The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition
by Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
VOLUME I DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND OTHER VERSES
DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES
Prelude
General Summary
Army Headquarters
Study of an Elevation, in Indian Ink
A Legend of the Foreign Office
The Story of Uriah
The Post that Fitted
Public Waste
Delilah
What Happened
Pink Dominoes
The Man Who Could Write
Municipal
A Code of Morals
The Last Department
OTHER VERSES
Recessional
The Vampire
To the Unknown Goddess
The Rubaiyat of Omar Kal'vin
La Nuit Blanche
My Rival
The Lovers' Litany
A Ballad of Burial
Divided Destinies
The Masque of Plenty
The Mare's Nest
Possibilities
Christmas in India
Pagett, M. P.
The Song of the Women
A Ballad of Jakko Hill
The Plea of the Simla Dancers
Ballad of Fisher's Boarding-House
"As the Bell Clinks"
An Old Song
Certain Maxims of Hafiz
The Grave of the Hundred Head
The Moon of Other Days
The Overland Mail
What the People Said
The Undertaker's Horse
The Fall of Jock Gillespie
Arithmetic on the Frontier
One Viceroy Resigns
The Betrothed
A Tale of Two Cities
VOLUME II BALLADS AND BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS
BALLADS
The Ballad of East and West
The Last Suttee
The Ballad of the King's Mercy
The Ballad of the King's Jest
The Ballad of Boh Da Thone
The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief
The Rhyme of the Three Captains
The Ballad of the "Clampherdown"
The Ballad of the "Bolivar"
The English Flag
Cleared
An Imperial Rescript
Tomlinson
Danny Deever
Tommy
Fuzzy-Wuzzv
Soldier, Soldier
Screw-Guns
Gunga Din
Oonts
Loot
"Snarleyow"
The Widow at Windsor
Belts
The Young British Soldier
Mandalay
Troopin'
Ford O' Kabul River
Route-Marchin'
VOLUME III THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW AND OTHER
GHOST STORIES
The Phantom 'Rickshaw
My Own True Ghost Story
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Man Who Would Be King
"The Finest Story in The World"
VOLUME IV UNDER THE DEODARS
The Education of Otis Yeere
At the Pit's Mouth
A Wayside Comedy
The Hill of Illusion
A Second-rate Woman
Only a Subaltern
In the Matter of a Private
The Enlightenments of Pagett. M. P.
VOLUME V PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
Lispeth
Three And an Extra
Thrown Away
Miss Youghal's Sais
"Yoked With an Unbeliever"
False Dawn
The Rescue of Pluffles
Cupid's Arrows
His Chance in Life
Watches of The Night
The Other Man
Consequences
The Conversion of Aurellan McGoggin
A Germ-destroyer
Kidnapped
The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly
In The House of Suddhoo
His Wedded Wife
The Broken-link Handicap
Beyond The Pale
In Error
A Bank Fraud
Tods' Amendment
In The Pride of His Youth
Pig
The Rout of The White Hussars
The Bronckhorst Divorce-case
Venus Annodomini
The Bisara of Pooree
A Friend's Friend
The Gate of The Hundred Sorrows
The Story of Muhammad Din
On The Strength of a Likeness
Wressley of The Foreign Office
By Word of Mouth
To Be Filed For Reference
The Last Relief
Bitters Neat
Haunted Subalterns
VOLUME VI THE LIGHT THAT FAILED
VOLUME VII THE STORY OF THE GADSBYS
Preface
Poor Dear Mamma
The World Without
The Tents of Kedar
With Any Amazement
The Garden of Eden
Fatima
The Valley of the Shadow
The Swelling of Jordan
VOLUME VIII from MINE OWN PEOPLE
Bimi
Namgay Doola
The Recrudescence Of Imray
Moti Guj--Mutineer
VOLUME I DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND OTHER VERSES
I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine,
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives that ye led were mine.
Was there aught that I did not share
In vigil or toil or ease,
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?
I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise--but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.
GENERAL SUMMARY
We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
India's prehistoric clay;
Whoso drew the longest bow,
Ran his brother down, you know,
As we run men down today.
"Dowb," the first of all his race,
Met the Mammoth face to face
On the lake or in the cave,
Stole the steadiest canoe,
Ate the quarry others slew,
Died--and took the finest grave.
When they scratched the reindeer-bone
Someone made the sketch his own,
Filched it from the artist--then,
Even in those early days,
Won a simple Viceroy's praise
Through the toil of other men.
Ere they hewed the Sphinx's visage
Favoritism governed kissage,
Even as it does in this age.
Who shall doubt the secret hid
Under Cheops' pyramid
Was that the contractor did
Cheops out of several millions?
Or that Joseph's sudden rise
To Comptroller of Supplies
Was a fraud of monstrous size
On King Pharoah's swart Civilians?
Thus, the artless songs I sing
Do not deal with anything
New or never said before.
As it was in the beginning,
Is today official sinning,
And shall be forevermore.
ARMY HEADQUARTERS
Old is the song that I sing--
Old as my unpaid bills--
Old as the chicken that kitmutgars bring
Men at dak-bungalows--old as the Hills.
Ahasuerus Jenkins of the "Operatic Own"
Was dowered with a tenor voice of super-Santley tone.
His views on equitation were, perhaps, a trifle queer;
He had no seat worth mentioning, but oh! he had an ear.
He clubbed his wretched company a dozen times a day,
He used to quit his charger in a parabolic way,
His method of saluting was the joy of all beholders,
But Ahasuerus Jenkins had a head upon his shoulders.
He took two months to Simla when the year was at the spring,
And underneath the deodars eternally did sing.
He warbled like a bulbul, but particularly at
Cornelia Agrippina who was musical and fat.
She controlled a humble husband, who, in turn, controlled a Dept.,
Where Cornelia Agrippina's human singing-birds were kept
From April to October on a plump retaining fee,
Supplied, of course, per mensem, by the Indian Treasury.
Cornelia used to sing with him, and Jenkins used to play;
He praised unblushingly her notes, for he was false as they:
So when the winds of April turned the budding roses brown,
Cornelia told her husband: "Tom, you mustn't send him down."
They haled him from his regiment which didn't much regret him;
They found for him an office-stool, and on that stool they set him,
To play with maps and catalogues three idle hours a day,
And draw his plump retaining fee--which means his double pay.
Now, ever after dinner, when the coffeecups are brought,
Ahasuerus waileth o'er the grand pianoforte;
And, thanks to fair Cornelia, his fame hath waxen great,
And Ahasuerus Jenkins is a power in the State.
STUDY OF AN ELEVATION, IN INDIAN INK
This ditty is a string of lies.
But--how the deuce did Gubbins rise?
POTIPHAR GUBBINS, C. E.,
Stands at the top of the tree;
And I muse in my bed on the reasons that led
To the hoisting of Potiphar G.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E.,
Is seven years junior to Me;
Each bridge that he makes he either buckles or breaks,
And his work is as rough as he.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E.,
Is coarse as a chimpanzee;
And I can't understand why you gave him your hand,
Lovely Mehitabel Lee.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E.,
Is dear to the Powers that Be;
For They bow and They smile in an affable style
Which is seldom accorded to Me.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E.,
Is certain as certain can be
Of a highly-paid post which is claimed by a host
Of seniors--including Me.
Careless and lazy is he,
Greatly inferior to Me.
What is the spell that you manage so well,
Commonplace Potiphar G.?
Lovely Mehitabel Lee,
Let me inquire of thee,
Should I have riz to what Potiphar is,
Hadst thou been mated to me?
A LEGEND
This is the reason why Rustum Beg,
Rajah of Kolazai,
Drinketh the "simpkin" and brandy peg,
Maketh the money to fly,
Vexeth a Government, tender and kind,
Also--but this is a detail--blind.
RUSTUM BEG of Kolazai--slightly backward native state
Lusted for a C. S. I.,--so began to sanitate.
Built a Jail and Hospital--nearly built a City drain--
Till his faithful subjects all thought their Ruler was insane.
Strange departures made he then--yea, Departments stranger still,
Half a dozen Englishmen helped the Rajah with a will,
Talked of noble aims and high, hinted of a future fine
For the state of Kolazai, on a strictly Western line.
Rajah Rustum held his peace; lowered octroi dues a half;
Organized a State Police; purified the. Civil Staff;
Settled cess and tax afresh in a very liberal way;
Cut temptations of the flesh--also cut the Bukhshi's pay;
Roused his Secretariat to a fine Mahratta fury,
By a Hookum hinting at supervision of dasturi;
Turned the State of Kolazai very nearly upside-down;
When the end of May was nigh, waited his achievement crown.
When the Birthday Honors came,
Sad to state and sad to see,
Stood against the Rajah's name nothing more than C. I. E.!
* * * * *
Things were lively for a week in the State of Kolazai.
Even now the people speak of that time regretfully.
How he disendowed the Jail--stopped at once the City drain;
Turned to beauty fair and frail--got his senses back again;
Doubled taxes, cesses, all; cleared away each new-built thana;
Turned the two-lakh Hospital into a superb Zenana;
Heaped upon the Bukhshi Sahib wealth and honors manifold;
Clad himself in Eastern garb--squeezed his people as of old.
Happy, happy Kolazai! Never more will Rustum Beg
Play to catch the Viceroy's eye. He prefers the "simpkin" peg.
THE STORY OF URIAH
"Now there were two men in one city;
the one rich and the other poor."
Jack Barrett went to Quetta
Because they told him to.
He left his wife at Simla
On three-fourths his monthly screw:
Jack Barrett died at Quetta
Ere the next month's pay he drew.
Jack Barrett went to Quetta.
He didn't understand
The reason of his transfer
From the pleasant mountain-land:
The season was September,
And it killed him out of hand.
Jack Barrett went to Quetta,
And there gave up the ghost,
Attempting two men's duty
In that very healthy post;
And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him
Five lively months at most.
Jack Barrett's bones at Quetta
Enjoy profound repose;
But I shouldn't be astonished
If now his spirit knows
The reason of his transfer
From the Himalayan snows.
And, when the Last Great Bugle Call
Adown the Hurnal throbs,
When the last grim joke is entered
In the big black Book of Jobs,
And Quetta graveyards give again
Their victims to the air,
I shouldn't like to be the man
Who sent Jack Barrett there.
THE POST THAT FITTED
Though tangled and twisted the course of true love
This ditty explains,
No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve
If the Lover has brains.
Ere the steamer bore him Eastward, Sleary was engaged to marry
An attractive girl at Tunbridge, whom he called "my little Carrie."
Sleary's pay was very modest; Sleary was the other way.
Who can cook a two-plate dinner on eight poor rupees a day?
Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished quarters--
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's daughters.
Certainly an impecunious Subaltern was not a catch,
But the Boffkins knew that Minnie mightn't make another match.
So they recognised the business and, to feed and clothe the bride,
Got him made a Something Something somewhere on the Bombay side.
Anyhow, the billet carried pay enough for him to marry--
As the artless Sleary put it:--"Just the thing for me and Carrie."
Did he, therefore, jilt Miss Boffkin--impulse of a baser mind?
No! He started epileptic fits of an appalling kind.
[Of his modus operandi only this much I could gather:--
"Pears's shaving sticks will give you little taste and lots of lather."]
Frequently in public places his affliction used to smite
Sleary with distressing vigour--always in the Boffkins' sight.
Ere a week was over Minnie weepingly returned his ring,
Told him his "unhappy weakness" stopped all thought of marrying.
Sleary bore the information with a chastened holy joy,--
Epileptic fits don't matter in Political employ,--
Wired three short words to Carrie--took his ticket, packed his kit--
Bade farewell to Minnie Boffkin in one last, long, lingering fit.
Four weeks later, Carrie Sleary read--and laughed until she wept--
Mrs. Boffkin's warning letter on the "wretched epilept." . . .
Year by year, in pious patience, vengeful Mrs. Boffkin sits
Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's fits.
PUBLIC WASTE
Walpole talks of "a man and his price."
List to a ditty queer--
The sale of a Deputy-Acting-Vice-
Resident-Engineer,
Bought like a bullock, hoof and hide,
By the Little Tin Gods on the Mountain Side.
By the Laws of the Family Circle 'tis written in letters of brass
That only a Colonel from Chatham can manage the Railways of State,
Because of the gold on his breeks, and the subjects wherein he must pass;
Because in all matters that deal not with Railways his knowledge is great.
Now Exeter Battleby Tring had laboured from boyhood to eld
On the Lines of the East and the West, and eke of the North and South;
Many Lines had he built and surveyed--important the posts which he held;
And the Lords of the Iron Horse were dumb when he opened his mouth.
Black as the raven his garb, and his heresies jettier still--
Hinting that Railways required lifetimes of study and knowledge--
Never clanked sword by his side--Vauban he knew not nor drill--
Nor was his name on the list of the men who had passed through the "College."
Wherefore the Little Tin Gods harried their little tin souls,
Seeing he came not from Chatham, jingled no spurs at his heels,
Knowing that, nevertheless, was he first on the Government rolls
For the billet of "Railway Instructor to Little Tin Gods on Wheels."
Letters not seldom they wrote him, "having the honour to state,"
It would be better for all men if he were laid on the shelf.
Much would accrue to his bank-book, an he consented to wait
Until the Little Tin Gods built him a berth for himself,
"Special, well paid, and exempt from the Law of the Fifty and Five,
Even to Ninety and Nine"--these were the terms of the pact:
Thus did the Little Tin Gods (long may Their Highnesses thrive!)
Silence his mouth with rupees, keeping their Circle intact;
Appointing a Colonel from Chatham who managed the Bhamo State Line
(The which was one mile and one furlong--a guaranteed twenty-inch gauge),
So Exeter Battleby Tring consented his claims to resign,
And died, on four thousand a month, in the ninetieth year of his age!
DELILAH
We have another viceroy now,--those days are dead and done
Of Delilah Aberyswith and depraved Ulysses Gunne.
Delilah Aberyswith was a lady--not too young--
With a perfect taste in dresses and a badly-bitted tongue,
With a thirst for information, and a greater thirst for praise,
And a little house in Simla in the Prehistoric Days.
By reason of her marriage to a gentleman in power,
Delilah was acquainted with the gossip of the hour;
And many little secrets, of the half-official kind,
Were whispered to Delilah, and she bore them all in mind.
She patronized extensively a man, Ulysses Gunne,
Whose mode of earning money was a low and shameful one.
He wrote for certain papers, which, as everybody knows,
Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.
He praised her "queenly beauty" first; and, later on, he hinted
At the "vastness of her intellect" with compliment unstinted.
He went with her a-riding, and his love for her was such
That he lent her all his horses and--she galled them very much.
One day, THEY brewed a secret of a fine financial sort;
It related to Appointments, to a Man and a Report.
'Twas almost worth the keeping,--only seven people knew it--
And Gunne rose up to seek the truth and patiently pursue it.
It was a Viceroy's Secret, but--perhaps the wine was red--
Perhaps an Aged Councillor had lost his aged head--
Perhaps Delilah's eyes were bright--Delilah's whispers sweet--
The Aged Member told her what 'twere treason to repeat.
Ulysses went a-riding, and they talked of love and flowers;
Ulysses went a-calling, and he called for several hours;
Ulysses went a-waltzing, and Delilah helped him dance--
Ulysses let the waltzes go, and waited for his chance.
The summer sun was setting, and the summer air was still,
The couple went a-walking in the shade of Summer Hill.
The wasteful sunset faded out in Turkish-green and gold,
Ulysses pleaded softly, and-- that bad Delilah told!
Next morn, a startled Empire learnt the all-important news;
Next week, the Aged Councillor was shaking in his shoes.
Next month, I met Delilah and she did not show the least
Hesitation in affirming that Ulysses was a "beast."
* * * * *
We have another Viceroy now, those days are dead and done--
Of Delilah Aberyswith and most mean Ulysses Gunne!
WHAT HAPPENED
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,
Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar,"
Waited on the Government with a claim to wear
Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.
Then the Indian Government winked a wicked wink,
Said to Chunder Mookerjee: "Stick to pen and ink.
They are safer implements, but, if you insist,
We will let you carry arms wheresoe'er you list."
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee sought the gunsmith and
Bought the tubes of Lancaster, Ballard, Dean, and Bland,
Bought a shiny bowie-knife, bought a town-made sword,
Jingled like a carriage-horse when he went abroad.
But the Indian Government, always keen to please,
Also gave permission to horrid men like these--
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai, down to kill or steal,
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer, Tantia the Bhil;
Killar Khan the Marri chief, Jowar Singh the Sikh,
Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat, Abdul Huq Rafiq--
He was a Wahabi; last, little Boh Hla-oo
Took advantage of the Act--took a Snider too.
They were unenlightened men, Ballard knew them not.
They procured their swords and guns chiefly on the spot;
And the lore of centuries, plus a hundred fights,
Made them slow to disregard one another's rights.
With a unanimity dear to patriot hearts
All those hairy gentlemen out of foreign parts
Said: "The good old days are back--let us go to war!"
Swaggered down the Grand Trunk Road into Bow Bazaar,
Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail;
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail;
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee
As he ground the butcher-knife of the Khyberee.
Jowar Singh the Sikh procured sabre, quoit, and mace,
Abdul Huq, Wahabi, jerked his dagger from its place,
While amid the jungle-grass danced and grinned and jabbered
Little Boh Hla-oo and cleared his dah-blade from the scabbard.
What became of Mookerjee? Soothly, who can say?
Yar Mahommed only grins in a nasty way,
Jowar Singh is reticent, Chimbu Singh is mute.
But the belts of all of them simply bulge with loot.
What became of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby
Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi;
And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are
Hanging in a Marri camp just across the Border.
What became of Mookerjee? Ask Mahommed Yar
Prodding Siva's sacred bull down the Bow Bazaar.
Speak to placid Nubbee Baksh--question land and sea--
Ask the Indian Congressmen--only don't ask me!
PINK DOMINOES
They are fools who kiss and tell"--
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.
Jenny and Me were engaged, you see,
On the eve of the Fancy Ball;
So a kiss or two was nothing to you
Or any one else at all.
Jenny would go in a domino--
Pretty and pink but warm;
While I attended, clad in a splendid
Austrian uniform.
Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged
Early that afternoon,
At Number Four to waltz no more,
But to sit in the dusk and spoon.
I wish you to see that Jenny and Me
Had barely exchanged our troth;
So a kiss or two was strictly due
By, from, and between us both.
When Three was over, an eager lover,
I fled to the gloom outside;
And a Domino came out also
Whom I took for my future bride.
That is to say, in a casual way,
I slipped my arm around her;
With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you),
And ready to kiss I found her.
She turned her head and the name she said
Was certainly not my own;
But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek
She fled and left me alone.
Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame
She'd doffed her domino;
And I had embraced an alien waist--
But I did not tell her so.
Next morn I knew that there were two
Dominoes pink, and one
Had cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian House,
Our big Political gun.
Sir J. was old, and her hair was gold,
And her eye was a blue cerulean;
And the name she said when she turned her head
Was not in the least like "Julian."
THE MAN WHO COULD WRITE
Shun--shun the Bowl! That fatal, facile drink
Has ruined many geese who dipped their quills in 't;
Bribe, murder, marry, but steer clear of Ink
Save when you write receipts for paid-up bills in 't.
There may be silver in the "blue-black"--all
I know of is the iron and the gall.
Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen,
Is a dismal failure--is a Might-have-been.
In a luckless moment he discovered men
Rise to high position through a ready pen.
Boanerges Blitzen argued therefore--"I,
With the selfsame weapon, can attain as high."
Only he did not possess when he made the trial,
Wicked wit of C-lv-n, irony of L--l.
[Men who spar with Government need, to back their blows,
Something more than ordinary journalistic prose.]
Never young Civilian's prospects were so bright,
Till an Indian paper found that he could write:
Never young Civilian's prospects were so dark,
When the wretched Blitzen wrote to make his mark.
Certainly he scored it, bold, and black, and firm,
In that Indian paper--made his seniors squirm,
Quoted office scandals, wrote the tactless truth--
Was there ever known a more misguided youth?
When the Rag he wrote for praised his plucky game,
Boanerges Blitzen felt that this was Fame;
When the men he wrote of shook their heads and swore,
Boanerges Blitzen only wrote the more:
Posed as Young Ithuriel, resolute and grim,
Till he found promotion didn't come to him;
Till he found that reprimands weekly were his lot,
And his many Districts curiously hot.
Till he found his furlough strangely hard to win,
Boanerges Blitzen didn't care to pin:
Then it seemed to dawn on him something wasn't right--
Boanerges Blitzen put it down to "spite";
Languished in a District desolate and dry;
Watched the Local Government yearly pass him by;
Wondered where the hitch was; called it most unfair.
* * * * * * * * *
That was seven years ago--and he still is there!
MUNICIPAL
"Why is my District death-rate low?"
Said Binks of Hezabad.
"Well, drains, and sewage-outfalls are
"My own peculiar fad.
"I learnt a lesson once, It ran
"Thus," quoth that most veracious man:--
It was an August evening and, in snowy garments clad,
I paid a round of visits in the lines of Hezabad;
When, presently, my Waler saw, and did not like at all,
A Commissariat elephant careering down the Mall.
I couldn't see the driver, and across my mind it rushed
That that Commissariat elephant had suddenly gone musth.
I didn't care to meet him, and I couldn't well get down,
So I let the Waler have it, and we headed for the town.
The buggy was a new one and, praise Dykes, it stood the strain,
Till the Waler jumped a bullock just above the City Drain;
And the next that I remember was a hurricane of squeals,
And the creature making toothpicks of my five-foot patent wheels.
He seemed to want the owner, so I fled, distraught with fear,
To the Main Drain sewage-outfall while he snorted in my ear--
Reached the four-foot drain-head safely and, in darkness and despair,
Felt the brute's proboscis fingering my terror-stiffened hair.
Heard it trumpet on my shoulder--tried to crawl a little higher--
Found the Main Drain sewage outfall blocked, some eight feet up, with mire;
And, for twenty reeking minutes, Sir, my very marrow froze,
While the trunk was feeling blindly for a purchase on my toes!
It missed me by a fraction, but my hair was turning grey
Before they called the drivers up and dragged the brute away.
Then I sought the City Elders, and my words were very plain.
They flushed that four-foot drain-head and--it never choked again!
You may hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure,
Till you've been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer.
I believe in well-flushed culverts. . . .
This is why the death-rate's small;
And, if you don't believe me, get shikarred yourself. That's all.
A CODE OF MORALS
Lest you should think this story true
I merely mention I
Evolved it lately. 'Tis a most
Unmitigated misstatement.
Now Jones had left his new-wed bride to keep his house in order,
And hied away to the Hurrum Hills above the Afghan border,
To sit on a rock with a heliograph; but ere he left he taught
His wife the working of the Code that sets the miles at naught.
And Love had made him very sage, as Nature made her fair;
So Cupid and Apollo linked , per heliograph, the pair.
At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise--
At e'en, the dying sunset bore her husband's homilies.
He warned her 'gainst seductive youths in scarlet clad and gold,
As much as 'gainst the blandishments paternal of the old;
But kept his gravest warnings for (hereby the ditty hangs)
That snowy-haired Lothario, Lieutenant-General Bangs.
'Twas General Bangs, with Aide and Staff, who tittupped on the way,
When they beheld a heliograph tempestuously at play.
They thought of Border risings, and of stations sacked and burnt--
So stopped to take the message down--and this is what they learnt--
"Dash dot dot, dot, dot dash, dot dash dot" twice. The General swore.
"Was ever General Officer addressed as 'dear' before?
"'My Love,' i' faith! 'My Duck,' Gadzooks! 'My darling popsy-wop!'
"Spirit of great Lord Wolseley, who is on that mountaintop?"
The artless Aide-de-camp was mute; the gilded Staff were still,
As, dumb with pent-up mirth, they booked that message from the hill;
For clear as summer lightning-flare, the husband's warning ran:--
"Don't dance or ride with General Bangs--a most immoral man."
[At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise--
But, howsoever Love be blind, the world at large hath eyes.]
With damnatory dot and dash he heliographed his wife
Some interesting details of the General's private life.
The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the shining Staff were still,
And red and ever redder grew the General's shaven gill.
And this is what he said at last (his feelings matter not):--
"I think we've tapped a private line. Hi! Threes about there! Trot!"
All honour unto Bangs, for ne'er did Jones thereafter know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan
They know the worthy General as "that most immoral man."
THE LAST DEPARTMENT
Twelve hundred million men are spread
About this Earth, and I and You
Wonder, when You and I are dead,
"What will those luckless millions do?"
None whole or clean, " we cry, "or free from stain
Of favour." Wait awhile, till we attain
The Last Department where nor fraud nor fools,
Nor grade nor greed, shall trouble us again.
Fear, Favour, or Affection--what are these
To the grim Head who claims our services?
I never knew a wife or interest yet
Delay that pukka step, miscalled "decease";
When leave, long overdue, none can deny;
When idleness of all Eternity
Becomes our furlough, and the marigold
Our thriftless, bullion-minting Treasury
Transferred to the Eternal Settlement,
Each in his strait, wood-scantled office pent,
No longer Brown reverses Smith's appeals,
Or Jones records his Minute of Dissent.
And One, long since a pillar of the Court,
As mud between the beams thereof is wrought;
And One who wrote on phosphates for the crops
Is subject-matter of his own Report.
These be the glorious ends whereto we pass--
Let Him who Is, go call on Him who Was;
And He shall see the mallie steals the slab
For currie-grinder, and for goats the grass.
A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight,
A draught of water, or a horse's fright--
The droning of the fat Sheristadar
Ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night
For you or Me. Do those who live decline
The step that offers, or their work resign?
Trust me, Today's Most Indispensables,
Five hundred men can take your place or mine.
OTHER VERSES
RECESSIONAL
(A Victorian Ode)
God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle line--
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies--
The Captains and the Kings depart--
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
Far-called our navies melt away--
On dune and headland sinks the fire--
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe--
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard--
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.
THE VAMPIRE
The verses--as suggested by the painting by Philip Burne Jones, first
exhibited at the new gallery in London in 1897.
A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair
(Even as you and I!)
Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand,
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand.
A fool there was and his goods he spent
(Even as you and I!)
Honor and faith and a sure intent
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(And it wasn't the least what the lady meant),
(Even as you and I!)
Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned,
Belong to the woman who didn't know why
(And now we know she never knew why)
And did not understand.
The fool we stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside--
(But it isn't on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died--
(Even as you and I!)
And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame
That stings like a white hot brand.
It's coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing at last she could never know why)
And never could understand.
TO THE UNKNOWN GODDESS
Will you conquer my heart with your beauty; my soul going out from afar?
Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar?
Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind?
Shall I meet you next session at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind?
Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West,
Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my
breast?
Will you stay in the Plains till September--my passion as warm as the day?
Will you bring me to book on the Mountains, or where the thermantidotes play?
When the light of your eyes shall make pallid the mean lesser lights I pursue,
And the charm of your presence shall lure me from love of the gay "thirteen-
two";
When the peg and the pig-skin shall please not; when I buy me Calcutta-build
clothes;
When I quit the Delight of Wild Asses; forswearing the swearing of oaths ;
As a deer to the hand of the hunter when I turn 'mid the gibes of my friends;
When the days of my freedom are numbered, and the life of the bachelor ends.
Ah, Goddess! child, spinster, or widow--as of old on Mars Hill whey they
raised
To the God that they knew not an altar--so I, a young Pagan, have praised
The Goddess I know not nor worship; yet, if half that men tell me be true,
You will come in the future, and therefore these verses are written to you.
THE RUPAIYAT OF OMAR KAL'VIN
[Allowing for the difference 'twixt prose and rhymed exaggeration, this ought
to reproduce the sense of what Sir A-- told the nation sometime ago, when the
Government struck from our incomes two per cent.]
Now the New Year, reviving last Year's Debt,
The Thoughtful Fisher casteth wide his Net;
So I with begging Dish and ready Tongue
Assail all Men for all that I can get.
Imports indeed are gone with all their Dues--
Lo! Salt a Lever that I dare not use,
Nor may I ask the Tillers in Bengal--
Surely my Kith and Kin will not refuse!
Pay--and I promise by the Dust of Spring,
Retrenchment. If my promises can bring
Comfort, Ye have Them now a thousandfold--
By Allah! I will promise Anything!
Indeed, indeed, Retrenchment oft before
I swore--but did I mean it when I swore?
And then, and then, We wandered to the Hills,
And so the Little Less became Much More.
Whether a Boileaugunge or Babylon,
I know not how the wretched Thing is done,
The Items of Receipt grow surely small;
The Items of Expense mount one by one.
I cannot help it. What have I to do
With One and Five, or Four, or Three, or Two?
Let Scribes spit Blood and Sulphur as they please,
Or Statesmen call me foolish--Heed not you.
Behold, I promise--Anything You will.
Behold, I greet you with an empty Till--
Ah! Fellow-Sinners, of your Charity
Seek not the Reason of the Dearth, but fill.
For if I sinned and fell, where lies the Gain
Of Knowledge? Would it ease you of your Pain
To know the tangled Threads of Revenue,
I ravel deeper in a hopeless Skein?
"Who hath not Prudence"--what was it I said,
Of Her who paints her Eyes and tires Her Head,
And gibes and mocks the People in the Street,
And fawns upon them for Her thriftless Bread?
Accursed is She of Eve's daughters--She
Hath cast off Prudence, and Her End shall be
Destruction . . . Brethren, of your Bounty
Some portion of your daily Bread to Me.
LA NUIT BLANCHE
A much-discerning Public hold
The Singer generally sings
And prints and sells his past for gold.
Whatever I may here disclaim,
The very clever folk I sing to
Will most indubitably cling to
Their pet delusion, just the same.
I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?
In the full, fresh fragrant morning
I observed a camel crawl,
Laws of gravitation scorning,
On the ceiling and the wall;
Then I watched a fender walking,
And I heard grey leeches sing,
And a red-hot monkey talking
Did not seem the proper thing.
Then a Creature, skinned and crimson,
Ran about the floor and cried,
And they said that I had the "jims" on,
And they dosed me with bromide,
And they locked me in my bedroom--
Me and one wee Blood Red Mouse--
Though I said: "To give my head room
You had best unroof the house."
But my words were all unheeded,
Though I told the grave M.D.
That the treatment really needed
Was a dip in open sea
That was lapping just below me,
Smooth as silver, white as snow,
And it took three men to throw me
When I found I could not go.
Half the night I watched the Heavens
Fizz like '81 champagne--
Fly to sixes and to sevens,
Wheel and thunder back again;
And when all was peace and order
Save one planet nailed askew,
Much I wept because my warder
Would not let me set it true.
After frenzied hours of waiting,
When the Earth and Skies were dumb,
Pealed an awful voice dictating
An interminable sum,
Changing to a tangle story--
"What she said you said I said"--
Till the Moon arose in glory,
And I found her . . . in my head;
Then a Face came, blind and weeping,
And It couldn't wipe its eyes,
And It muttered I was keeping
Back the moonlight from the skies;
So I patted it for pity,
But it whistled shrill with wrath,
And a huge black Devil City
Poured its peoples on my path.
So I fled with steps uncertain
On a thousand-year long race,
But the bellying of the curtain
Kept me always in one place;
While the tumult rose and maddened
To the roar of Earth on fire,
Ere it ebbed and sank and saddened
To a whisper tense as wire.
In tolerable stillness
Rose one little, little star,
And it chuckled at my illness,
And it mocked me from afar;
And its brethren came and eyed me,
Called the Universe to aid,
Till I lay, with naught to hide me,
'Neath the Scorn of All Things Made.
Dun and saffron, robed and splendid,
Broke the solemn, pitying Day,
And I knew my pains were ended,
And I turned and tried to pray;
But my speech was shattered wholly,
And I wept as children weep.
Till the dawn-wind, softly, slowly,
Brought to burning eyelids sleep.
MY RIVAL
I go to concert, party, ball--
What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
They burn before her shrine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
I cannot check my girlish blush,
My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
And sometimes to my nose.
But She is white where white should be,
And red where red should shine.
The blush that flies at seventeen
Is fixed at forty-nine.
I wish I had Her constant cheek;
I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I'm very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren't in my line;
And, worst of all, I'm seventeen
While She is forty-nine.
The young men come, the young men go
Each pink and white and neat,
She's older than their mothers, but
They grovel at Her feet.
They walk beside Her 'rickshaw wheels--
None ever walk by mine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
She rides with half a dozen men,
(She calls them "boys" and "mashers")
I trot along the Mall alone;
My prettiest frocks and sashes
Don't help to fill my programme-card,
And vainly I repine
From ten to two A.M. Ah me!
Would I were forty-nine!
She calls me "darling," "pet," and "dear,"
And "sweet retiring maid."
I'm always at the back, I know,
She puts me in the shade.
She introduces me to men,
"Cast" lovers, I opine,
For sixty takes to seventeen,
Nineteen to forty-nine.
But even She must older grow
And end Her dancing days,
She can't go on forever so
At concerts, balls and plays.
One ray of priceless hope I see
Before my footsteps shine;
Just think, that She'll be eighty-one
When I am forty-nine.
THE LOVERS' LITANY
Eyes of grey--a sodden quay,
Driving rain and falling tears,
As the steamer wears to sea
In a parting storm of cheers.
Sing, for Faith and Hope are high--
None so true as you and I--
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of black--a throbbing keel,
Milky foam to left and right;
Whispered converse near the wheel
In the brilliant tropic night.
Cross that rules the Southern Sky!
Stars that sweep and wheel and fly,
Hear the Lovers' Litany:
Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of brown--a dusty plain
Split and parched with heat of June,
Flying hoof and tightened rein,
Hearts that beat the old, old tune.
Side by side the horses fly,
Frame we now the old reply
Of the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
Eyes of blue--the Simla Hills
Silvered with the moonlight hoar;
Pleading of the waltz that thrills,
Dies and echoes round Benmore.
"Mabel," "Officers," "Goodbye,"
Glamour, wine, and witchery--
On my soul's sincerity,
"Love like ours can never die!"
Maidens of your charity,
Pity my most luckless state.
Four times Cupid's debtor I--
Bankrupt in quadruplicate.
Yet, despite this evil case,
And a maiden showed me grace,
Four-and-forty times would I
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"
A BALLAD OF BURIAL
("Saint @Proxed's ever was the Church for peace")
If down here I chance to die,
Solemnly I beg you take
All that is left of "I"
To the Hills for old sake's sake,
Pack me very thoroughly
In the ice that used to slake
Pegs I drank when I was dry--
This observe for old sake's sake.
To the railway station hie,
There a single ticket take
For Umballa--goods-train--I
Shall not mind delay or shake.
I shall rest contentedly
Spite of clamor coolies make;
Thus in state and dignity
Send me up for old sake's sake.
Next the sleepy Babu wake,
Book a Kalka van "for four."
Few, I think, will care to make
Journeys with me any more
As they used to do of yore.
I shall need a "special" break--
Thing I never took before--
Get me one for old sake's sake.
After that--arrangements make.
No hotel will take me in,
And a bullock's back would break
'Neath the teak and leaden skin
Tonga ropes are frail and thin,
Or, did I a back-seat take,
In a tonga I might spin,--
Do your best for old sake's sake.
After that--your work is done.
Recollect a Padre must
Mourn the dear departed one--
Throw the ashes and the dust.
Don't go down at once. I trust
You will find excuse to "snake
Three days' casual on the bust."
Get your fun for old sake's sake.
I could never stand the Plains.
Think of blazing June and May
Think of those September rains
Yearly till the Judgment Day!
I should never rest in peace,
I should sweat and lie awake.
Rail me then, on my decease,
To the Hills for old sake's sake.
DIVIDED DESTINIES
It was an artless Bandar, and he danced upon a pine,
And much I wondered how he lived, and where the beast might dine,
And many, many other things, till, o'er my morning smoke,
I slept the sleep of idleness and dreamt that Bandar spoke.
He said: "O man of many clothes! Sad crawler on the Hills!
Observe, I know not Ranken's shop, nor Ranken's monthly bills;
I take no heed to trousers or the coats that you call dress;
Nor am I plagued with little cards for little drinks at Mess.
"I steal the bunnia's grain at morn, at noon and eventide,
(For he is fat and I am spare), I roam the mountain side,
I follow no man's carriage, and no, never in my life
Have I flirted at Peliti's with another Bandar's wife.
"O man of futile fopperies--unnecessary wraps;
I own no ponies in the hills, I drive no tall-wheeled traps;
I buy me not twelve-button gloves, 'short-sixes' eke, or rings,
Nor do I waste at Hamilton's my wealth on 'pretty things.'
"I quarrel with my wife at home, we never fight abroad;
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact I am her only lord.
I never heard of fever--dumps nor debts depress my soul;
And I pity and despise you!" Here he poached my breakfast-roll.
His hide was very mangy, and his face was very red,
And ever and anon he scratched with energy his head.
His manners were not always nice, but how my spirit cried
To be an artless Bandar loose upon the mountain side!
So I answered: "Gentle Bandar, an inscrutable Decree
Makes thee a gleesome fleasome Thou, and me a wretched Me.
Go! Depart in peace, my brother, to thy home amid the pine;
Yet forget not once a mortal wished to change his lot for thine."
THE MASQUE OF PLENTY
Argument.--The Indian Government being minded to discover the economic
condition of their lands, sent a Committee to inquire into it; and saw that it
was good.
Scene.--The wooded heights of Simla. The Incarnation of
the Government of India in the raiment of the Angel of Plenty
sings, to pianoforte accompaniment:--
"How sweet is the shepherd's sweet life!
From the dawn to the even he strays--
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.
(adagio dim.) Filled with praise!"
(largendo con sp.) Now this is the position,
Go make an inquisition
Into their real condition
As swiftly as ye may.
(p) Ay, paint our swarthy billions
The richest of vermillions
Ere two well-led cotillions
Have danced themselves away.
Turkish Patrol, as able and intelligent Investigators wind
down the Himalayas:--
What is the state of the Nation? What is its occupation?
Hi! get along, get along, get along--lend us the information!
(dim.) Census the byle and the yabu--capture a first-class Babu,
Set him to file Gazetteers--Gazetteers . . .
(ff) What is the state of the Nation, etc., etc.
Interlude, from Nowhere in Particular, to stringed and Oriental
instruments.
Our cattle reel beneath the yoke they bear--
The earth is iron and the skies are brass--
And faint with fervour of the flaming air
The languid hours pass.
The well is dry beneath the village tree--
The young wheat withers ere it reach a span,
And belts of blinding sand show cruelly
Where once the river ran.
Pray, brothers, pray, but to no earthly King--
Lift up your hands above the blighted grain,
Look westward--if they please, the Gods shall bring
Their mercy with the rain.
Look westward--bears the blue no brown cloud-bank?
Nay, it is written--wherefore should we fly?
On our own field and by our cattle's flank
Lie down, lie down to die!
Semi-Chorus
By the plumed heads of Kings
Waving high,
Where the tall corn springs
O'er the dead.
If they rust or rot we die,
If they ripen we are fed.
Very mighty is the power of our Kings!
Triumphal return to Simla of the Investigators, attired after
the manner of Dionysus, leading a pet tiger-cub in wreaths
of rhubarb-leaves, symbolical of India under medical treatment.
They sing:--
We have seen, we have written--behold it, the proof of our manifold toil!
In their hosts they assembled and told it--the tale of the Sons of the Soil.
We have said of the Sickness--"Where is it?"--and of Death--"It is far from
our ken,"--
We have paid a particular visit to the affluent children of men.
We have trodden the mart and the well-curb--we have stooped to the field and
the byre;
And the King may the forces of Hell curb for the People have all they desire!
Castanets and step-dance:--
Oh, the dom and the mag and the thakur and the thag,
And the nat and the brinjaree,
And the bunnia and the ryot are as happy and as quiet
And as plump as they can be!
Yes, the jain and the jat in his stucco-fronted hut,
And the bounding bazugar,
By the favour of the King, are as fat as anything,
They are--they are--they are!
Recitative, Government of India, with white satin wings and electro-plated
harp:--
How beautiful upon the Mountains--in peace reclining,
Thus to be assured that our people are unanimously dining.
And though there are places not so blessed as others in natural advantages,
which, after all, was only to be expected,
Proud and glad are we to congratulate you upon the work you have thus ably
effected.
(Cres.) How be-ewtiful upon the Mountains!
Hired Band, brasses only, full chorus:--
God bless the Squire
And all his rich relations
Who teach us poor people
We eat our proper rations--
We eat our proper rations,
In spite of inundations,
Malarial exhalations,
And casual starvations,
We have, we have, they say we have--
We have our proper rations!
Chorus of the Crystallised Facts
Before the beginning of years
There came to the rule of the State
Men with a pair of shears,
Men with an Estimate--
Strachey with Muir for leaven,
Lytton with locks that fell,
Ripon fooling with Heaven,
And Temple riding like H--ll!
And the bigots took in hand
Cess and the falling of rain,
And the measure of sifted sand
The dealer puts in the grain--
Imports by land and sea,
To uttermost decimal worth,
And registration--free--
In the houses of death and of birth.
And fashioned with pens and paper,
And fashioned in black and white,
With Life for a flickering taper
And Death for a blazing light--
With the Armed and the Civil Power,
That his strength might endure for a span--
From Adam's Bridge to Peshawur,
The Much Administered Man.
In the towns of the North and the East,
They gathered as unto rule,
They bade him starve his priest
And send his children to school.
Railways and roads they wrought,
For the needs of the soil within;
A time to squabble in court,
A time to bear and to grin.
And gave him peace in his ways,
Jails--and Police to fight,
Justice--at length of days,
And Right--and Might in the Right.
His speech is of mortgaged bedding,
On his kine he borrows yet,
At his heart is his daughter's wedding,
In his eye foreknowledge of debt.
He eats and hath indigestion,
He toils and he may not stop;
His life is a long-drawn question
Between a crop and a crop.
THE MARE'S NEST
Jane Austen Beecher Stowe de Rouse
Was good beyond all earthly need;
But, on the other hand, her spouse
Was very, very bad indeed.
He smoked cigars, called churches slow,
And raced--but this she did not know.
For Belial Machiavelli kept
The little fact a secret, and,
Though o'er his minor sins she wept,
Jane Austen did not understand
That Lilly--thirteen-two and bay
Absorbed one-half her husband's pay.
She was so good, she made him worse;
(Some women are like this, I think;)
He taught her parrot how to curse,
Her Assam monkey how to drink.
He vexed her righteous soul until
She went up, and he went down hill.
Then came the crisis, strange to say,
Which turned a good wife to a better.
A telegraphic peon, one day,
Brought her--now, had it been a letter
For Belial Machiavelli, I
Know Jane would just have let it lie.
But 'twas a telegram instead,
Marked "urgent," and her duty plain
To open it. Jane Austen read:
"Your Lilly's got a cough again.
Can't understand why she is kept
At your expense." Jane Austen wept.
It was a misdirected wire.
Her husband was at Shaitanpore.
She spread her anger, hot as fire,
Through six thin foreign sheets or more.
Sent off that letter, wrote another
To her solicitor--and mother.
Then Belial Machiavelli saw
Her error and, I trust, his own,
Wired to the minion of the Law,
And traveled wifeward--not alone.
For Lilly--thirteen-two and bay--
Came in a horse-box all the way.
There was a scene--a weep or two--
With many kisses. Austen Jane
Rode Lilly all the season through,
And never opened wires again.
She races now with Belial. This
Is very sad, but so it is.
POSSIBILITIES
Ay, lay him 'neath the Simla pine--
A fortnight fully to be missed,
Behold, we lose our fourth at whist,
A chair is vacant where we dine.
His place forgets him; other men
Have bought his ponies, guns, and traps.
His fortune is the Great Perhaps
And that cool rest-house down the glen,
Whence he shall hear, as spirits may,
Our mundane revel on the height,
Shall watch each flashing 'rickshaw-light
Sweep on to dinner, dance, and play.
Benmore shall woo him to the ball
With lighted rooms and braying band;
And he shall hear and understand
"Dream Faces" better than us all.
For, think you, as the vapours flee
Across Sanjaolie after rain,
His soul may climb the hill again
To each field of victory.
Unseen, who women held so dear,
The strong man's yearning to his kind
Shall shake at most the window-blind,
Or dull awhile the card-room's cheer.
@In his own place of power unknown,
His Light o' Love another's flame,
And he an alien and alone!
Yet may he meet with many a friend--
Shrewd shadows, lingering long unseen
Among us when "God save the Queen"
Shows even "extras" have an end.
And, when we leave the heated room,
And, when at four the lights expire,
The crew shall gather round the fire
And mock our laughter in the gloom;
Talk as we talked, and they ere death--
Flirt wanly, dance in ghostly-wise,
With ghosts of tunes for melodies,
And vanish at the morning's breath.
CHRISTMAS IN INDIA
Dim dawn behind the tamarisks--the sky is saffron-yellow--
As the women in the village grind the corn,
And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow
That the Day, the staring Easter Day is born.
Oh the white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway!
Oh the clammy fog that hovers o'er the earth;
And at Home they're making merry 'neath the white and scarlet berry--
What part have India's exiles in their mirth?
Full day behind the tamarisks--the sky is blue and staring--
As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke,
And they bear One o'er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring,
To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke.
Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly--
Call on Rama--he may hear, perhaps, your voice!
With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars,
And today we bid "good Christian men rejoice!"
High noon behind the tamarisks--the sun is hot above us--
As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.
They will drink our healths at dinner--those who tell us how they love us,
And forget us till another year be gone!
Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the Heimweh, ceaseless, aching!
Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain!
Youth was cheap--wherefore we sold it.
Gold was good--we hoped to hold it,
And today we know the fulness of our gain.
Grey dusk behind the tamarisks--the parrots fly together--
As the sun is sinking slowly over Home;
And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether.
That drags us back howe'er so far we roam.
Hard her service, poor her payment--she is ancient, tattered raiment--
India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.
If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter,
The door is shut--we may not look behind.
Black night behind the tamarisks--the owls begin their chorus--
As the conches from the temple scream and bray.
With the fruitless years behind us, and the hopeless years before us,
Let us honor, O my brother, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labors--let us feast with friends and
neighbors,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.
PAGETT, M.P.
The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.
Pagett, M.P., was a liar, and a fluent liar therewith--
He spoke of the heat of India as the "Asian Solar Myth";
Came on a four months' visit, to "study the East," in November,
And I got him to sign an agreement vowing to stay till September.
March came in with the koil. Pagett was cool and gay,
Called me a "bloated Brahmin," talked of my "princely pay."
March went out with the roses. "Where is your heat?" said he.
"Coming," said I to Pagett, "Skittles!" said Pagett, M.P.
April began with the punkah, coolies, and prickly-heat,--
Pagett was dear to mosquitoes, sandflies found him a treat.
He grew speckled and mumpy--hammered, I grieve to say,
Aryan brothers who fanned him, in an illiberal way.
May set in with a dust-storm,--Pagett went down with the sun.
All the delights of the season tickled him one by one.
Imprimis--ten day's "liver"--due to his drinking beer;
Later, a dose of fever--slight, but he called it severe.
Dysent'ry touched him in June, after the Chota Bursat--
Lowered his portly person--made him yearn to depart.
He didn't call me a "Brahmin," or "bloated," or "overpaid,"
But seemed to think it a wonder that any one stayed.
July was a trifle unhealthy,--Pagett was ill with fear.
'Called it the "Cholera Morbus," hinted that life was dear.
He babbled of "Eastern Exile," and mentioned his home with tears;
But I haven't seen my children for close upon seven years.
We reached a hundred and twenty once in the Court at noon,
(I've mentioned Pagett was portly) Pagett, went off in a swoon.
That was an end to the business; Pagett, the perjured, fled
With a practical, working knowledge of "Solar Myths" in his head.
And I laughed as I drove from the station, but the mirth died out on my lips
As I thought of the fools like Pagett who write of their "Eastern trips,"
And the sneers of the traveled idiots who duly misgovern the land,
And I prayed to the Lord to deliver another one into my hand.
THE SONG OF THE WOMEN
How shall she know the worship we would do her?
The walls are high, and she is very far.
How shall the woman's message reach unto her
Above the tumult of the packed bazaar?
Free wind of March, against the lattice blowing,
Bear thou our thanks, lest she depart unknowing.
Go forth across the fields we may not roam in,
Go forth beyond the trees that rim the city,
To whatsoe'er fair place she hath her home in,
Who dowered us with wealth of love and pity.
Out of our shadow pass, and seek her singing--
"I have no gifts but Love alone for bringing."
Say that we be a feeble folk who greet her,
But old in grief, and very wise in tears;
Say that we, being desolate, entreat her
That she forget us not in after years;
For we have seen the light, and it were grievous
To dim that dawning if our lady leave us.
By life that ebbed with none to stanch the failing
By Love's sad harvest garnered in the spring,
When Love in ignorance wept unavailing
O'er young buds dead before their blossoming;
By all the grey owl watched, the pale moon viewed,
In past grim years, declare our gratitude!
By hands uplifted to the Gods that heard not,
By fits that found no favor in their sight,
By faces bent above the babe that stirred not,
By nameless horrors of the stifling night;
By ills foredone, by peace her toils discover,
Bid Earth be good beneath and Heaven above her!
If she have sent her servants in our pain
If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword;
If she have given back our sick again.
And to the breast the waking lips restored,
Is it a little thing that she has wrought?
Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought.
Go forth, O wind, our message on thy wings,
And they shall hear thee pass and bid thee speed,
In reed-roofed hut, or white-walled home of kings,
Who have been helpen by her in their need.
All spring shall give thee fragrance, and the wheat
Shall be a tasselled floorcloth to thy feet.
Haste, for our hearts are with thee, take no rest!
Loud-voiced ambassador, from sea to sea
Proclaim the blessing, manifold, confessed.
Of those in darkness by her hand set free.
Then very softly to her presence move,
And whisper: "Lady, lo, they know and love!"
A BALLAD OF JAKKO HILL
One moment bid the horses wait,
Since tiffin is not laid till three,
Below the upward path and straight
You climbed a year ago with me.
Love came upon us suddenly
And loosed--an idle hour to kill--
A headless, armless armory
That smote us both on Jakko Hill.
Ah Heaven! we would wait and wait
Through Time and to Eternity!
Ah Heaven! we could conquer Fate
With more than Godlike constancy
I cut the date upon a tree--
Here stand the clumsy figures still:
"10-7-85, A.D."
Damp with the mist of Jakko Hill.
What came of high resolve and great,
And until Death fidelity!
Whose horse is waiting at your gate?
Whose 'rickshaw-wheels ride over me?
No Saint's, I swear; and--let me see
Tonight what names your programme fill--
We drift asunder merrily,
As drifts the mist on Jakko Hill.
L'ENVOI.
Princess, behold our ancient state
Has clean departed; and we see
'Twas Idleness we took for Fate
That bound light bonds on you and me.
Amen! Here ends the comedy
Where it began in all good will;
Since Love and Leave together flee
As driven mist on Jakko Hill!
THE PLEA OF THE SIMLA DANCERS
Too late, alas! the song
To remedy the wrong;--
The rooms are taken from us, swept and
garnished for their fate.
But these tear-besprinkled pages
Shall attest to future ages
That we cried against the crime of it--
too late, alas! too late!
"What have we ever done to bear this grudge?"
Was there no room save only in Benmore
For docket, duftar, and for office drudge,
That you usurp our smoothest dancing floor?
Must babus do their work on polished teak?
Are ball-rooms fittest for the ink you spill?
Was there no other cheaper house to seek?
You might have left them all at Strawberry Hill.
We never harmed you! Innocent our guise,
Dainty our shining feet, our voices low;
And we revolved to divers melodies,
And we were happy but a year ago.
Tonight, the moon that watched our lightsome wiles--
That beamed upon us through the deodars--
Is wan with gazing on official files,
And desecrating desks disgust the stars.
Nay! by the memory of tuneful nights--
Nay! by the witchery of flying feet--
Nay! by the glamour of foredone delights--
By all things merry, musical, and meet--
By wine that sparkled, and by sparkling eyes--
By wailing waltz--by reckless galop's strain--
By dim verandas and by soft replies,
Give us our ravished ball-room back again!
Or--hearken to the curse we lay on you!
The ghosts of waltzes shall perplex your brain,
And murmurs of past merriment pursue
Your 'wildered clerks that they indite in vain;
And when you count your poor Provincial millions,
The only figures that your pen shall frame
Shall be the figures of dear, dear cotillions
Danced out in tumult long before you came.
Yea! "See Saw" shall upset your estimates,
"Dream Faces" shall your heavy heads bemuse,
Because your hand, unheeding, desecrates
Our temple; fit for higher, worthier use.
And all the long verandas, eloquent
With echoes of a score of Simla years,
Shall plague you with unbidden sentiment--
Babbling of kisses, laughter, love, and tears.
So shall you mazed amid old memories stand,
So shall you toil, and shall accomplish nought,
And ever in your ears a phantom Band
Shall blare away the staid official thought.
Wherefore--and ere this awful curse he spoken,
Cast out your swarthy sacrilegious train,
And give--ere dancing cease and hearts be broken--
Give us our ravished ball-room back again!
THE BALLAD OF FISHER'S BOARDING-HOUSE
That night, when through the mooring-chains
The wide-eyed corpse rolled free,
To blunder down by Garden Reach
And rot at Kedgeree,
The tale the Hughli told the shoal
The lean shoal told to me.
'T was Fultah Fisher's boarding-house,
Where sailor-men reside,
And there were men of all the ports
From Mississip to Clyde,
And regally they spat and smoked,
And fearsomely they lied.
They lied about the purple Sea
That gave them scanty bread,
They lied about the Earth beneath,
The Heavens overhead,
For they had looked too often on
Black rum when that was red.
They told their tales of wreck and wrong,
Of shame and lust and fraud,
They backed their toughest statements with
The Brimstone of the Lord,
And crackling oaths went to and fro
Across the fist-banged board.
And there was Hans the blue-eyed Dane,
Bull-throated, bare of arm,
Who carried on his hairy chest
The maid Ultruda's charm--
The little silver crucifix
That keeps a man from harm.
And there was Jake Without-the-Ears,
And Pamba the Malay,
And Carboy Gin the Guinea cook,
And Luz from Vigo Bay,
And Honest Jack who sold them slops
And harvested their pay.
And there was Salem Hardieker,
A lean Bostonian he--
Russ, German, English, Halfbreed, Finn,
Yank, Dane, and Portuguee,
At Fultah Fisher's boarding-house
They rested from the sea.
Now Anne of Austria shared their drinks,
Collinga knew her fame,
From Tarnau in Galicia
To Juan Bazaar she came,
To eat the bread of infamy
And take the wage of shame.
She held a dozen men to heel--
Rich spoil of war was hers,
In hose and gown and ring and chain,
From twenty mariners,
And, by Port Law, that week, men called
her Salem Hardieker's.
But seamen learnt--what landsmen know--
That neither gifts nor gain
Can hold a winking Light o' Love
Or Fancy's flight restrain,
When Anne of Austria rolled her eyes
On Hans the blue-eyed Dane.
Since Life is strife, and strife means knife,
From Howrah to the Bay,
And he may die before the dawn
Who liquored out the day,
In Fultah Fisher's boarding-house
We woo while yet we may.
But cold was Hans the blue-eyed Dane,
Bull-throated, bare of arm,
And laughter shook the chest beneath
The maid Ultruda's charm--
The little silver crucifix
That keeps a man from harm.
"You speak to Salem Hardieker;
"You was his girl, I know.
"I ship mineselfs tomorrow, see,
"Und round the Skaw we go,
"South, down the Cattegat, by Hjelm,
"To Besser in Saro."
When love rejected turns to hate,
All ill betide the man.
"You speak to Salem Hardieker"--
She spoke as woman can.
A scream--a sob--"He called me--names!"
And then the fray began.
An oath from Salem Hardieker,
A shriek upon the stairs,
A dance of shadows on the wall,
A knife-thrust unawares--
And Hans came down, as cattle drop,
Across the broken chairs.
* * * * * *
In Anne of Austria's trembling hands
The weary head fell low:--
"I ship mineselfs tomorrow, straight
"For Besser in Saro;
"Und there Ultruda comes to me
"At Easter, und I go--
"South, down the Cattegat--What's here?
"There--are--no--lights--to guide!"
The mutter ceased, the spirit passed,
And Anne of Austria cried
In Fultah Fisher's boarding-house
When Hans the mighty died.
Thus slew they Hans the blue-eyed Dane,
Bull-throated, bare of arm,
But Anne of Austria looted first
The maid Ultruda's charm--
The little silver crucifix
That keeps a man from harm.
AS THE BELL CLINKS
As I left the Halls at Lumley, rose the vision of a comely
Maid last season worshipped dumbly, watched with fervor from afar;
And I wondered idly, blindly, if the maid would greet me kindly.
That was all--the rest was settled by the clinking tonga-bar.
Yea, my life and hers were coupled by the tonga coupling-bar.
For my misty meditation, at the second changin'-station,
Suffered sudden dislocation, fled before the tuneless jar
Of a Wagner obbligato, scherzo, doublehand staccato,
Played on either pony's saddle by the clacking tonga-bar--
Played with human speech, I fancied, by the jigging, jolting bar.
"She was sweet," thought I, "last season, but 'twere surely wild unreason
Such tiny hope to freeze on as was offered by my Star,
When she whispered, something sadly: 'I--we feel your going badly!'"
"And you let the chance escape you?" rapped the rattling tonga-bar.
"What a chance and what an idiot!" clicked the vicious tonga-bar.
Heart of man--oh, heart of putty! Had I gone by Kakahutti,
On the old Hill-road and rutty, I had 'scaped that fatal car.
But his fortune each must bide by, so I watched the milestones slide by,
To "You call on Her tomorrow!"--fugue with cymbals by the bar--
"You must call on Her tomorrow!"--post-horn gallop by the bar.
Yet a further stage my goal on--we were whirling down to Solon,
With a double lurch and roll on, best foot foremost, ganz und gar--
"She was very sweet," I hinted. "If a kiss had been imprinted?"--
"'Would ha' saved a world of trouble!" clashed the busy tonga-bar.
"'Been accepted or rejected!" banged and clanged the tonga-bar.
Then a notion wild and daring, 'spite the income tax's paring,
And a hasty thought of sharing--less than many incomes are,
Made me put a question private, you can guess what I would drive at.
"You must work the sum to prove it," clanked the careless tonga-bar.
"Simple Rule of Two will prove it," lilted back the tonga-bar.
It was under Khyraghaut I mused. "Suppose the maid be haughty--
(There are lovers rich--and rotty)--wait some wealthy Avatar?
Answer monitor untiring, 'twixt the ponies twain perspiring!"
"Faint heart never won fair lady," creaked the straining tonga-bar.
"Can I tell you ere you ask Her?" pounded slow the tonga-bar.
Last, the Tara Devi turning showed the lights of Simla burning,
Lit my little lazy yearning to a fiercer flame by far.
As below the Mall we jingled, through my very heart it tingled--
Did the iterated order of the threshing tonga-bar--
"Try your luck--you can't do better!" twanged the loosened tonga-bar.
AN OLD SONG
So long as 'neath the Kalka hills
The tonga-horn shall ring,
So long as down the Solon dip
The hard-held ponies swing,
So long as Tara Devi sees
The lights of Simla town,
So long as Pleasure calls us up,
Or Duty drives us down,
If you love me as I love you
What pair so happy as we two?
So long as Aces take the King,
Or backers take the bet,
So long as debt leads men to wed,
Or marriage leads to debt,
So long as little luncheons, Love,
And scandal hold their vogue,
While there is sport at Annandale
Or whisky at Jutogh,
If you love me as I love you
What knife can cut our love in two?
So long as down the rocking floor
The raving polka spins,
So long as Kitchen Lancers spur
The maddened violins,
So long as through the whirling smoke
We hear the oft-told tale--
"Twelve hundred in the Lotteries,"
And Whatshername for sale?
If you love me as I love you
We'll play the game and win it too.
So long as Lust or Lucre tempt
Straight riders from the course,
So long as with each drink we pour
Black brewage of Remorse,
So long as those unloaded guns
We keep beside the bed,
Blow off, by obvious accident,
The lucky owner's head,
If you love me as I love you
What can Life kill or Death undo?
So long as Death 'twixt dance and dance
Chills best and bravest blood,
And drops the reckless rider down
The rotten, rain-soaked khud,
So long as rumours from the North
Make loving wives afraid,
So long as Burma takes the boy
Or typhoid kills the maid,
If you love me as I love you
What knife can cut our love in two?
By all that lights our daily life
Or works our lifelong woe,
From Boileaugunge to Simla Downs
And those grim glades below,
Where, heedless of the flying hoof
And clamour overhead,
Sleep, with the grey langur for guard
Our very scornful Dead,
If you love me as I love you
All Earth is servant to us two!
By Docket, Billetdoux, and File,
By Mountain, Cliff, and Fir,
By Fan and Sword and Office-box,
By Corset, Plume, and Spur
By Riot, Revel, Waltz, and War,
By Women, Work, and Bills,
By all the life that fizzes in
The everlasting Hills,
If you love me as I love you
What pair so happy as we two?
CERTAIN MAXIMS OF HAFIZ
I.
If It be pleasant to look on, stalled in the packed serai,
Does not the Young Man try Its temper and pace ere he buy?
If She be pleasant to look on, what does the Young Man say?
"Lo! She is pleasant to look on, give Her to me today!"
II.
Yea, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum
If he borrowed in life from a native at sixty per cent. per annum.
III.
Blister we not for bursati? So when the heart is vexed,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next.
IV.
The temper of chums, the love of your wife, and a new piano's tune--
Which of the three will you trust at the end of an Indian June?
V.
Who are the rulers of Ind--to whom shall we bow the knee?
Make your peace with the women, and men will make you L. G.
VI.
Does the woodpecker flit round the young ferash?
Does grass clothe a new-built wall?
Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in her thrall?
VII.
If She grow suddenly gracious--reflect. Is it all for thee?
The black-buck is stalked through the bullock, and Man through jealousy.
VIII.
Seek not for favor of women. So shall you find it indeed.
Does not the boar break cover just when you're lighting a weed?
IX.
If He play, being young and unskilful, for shekels of silver and gold,
Take his money, my son, praising Allah. The kid was ordained to be sold.
X.
With a "weed" among men or horses verily this is the best,
That you work him in office or dog-cart lightly--but give him no rest.
XI.
Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thorn-bit of Marriage.
XII.
As the thriftless gold of the babul, so is the gold that we spend
On a derby Sweep, or our neighbor's wife, or the horse that we buy from a
friend.
XIII.
The ways of man with a maid be strange, yet simple and tame
To the ways of a man with a horse, when selling or racing that same.
XIV.
In public Her face turneth to thee, and pleasant Her smile when ye meet.
It is ill. The cold rocks of El-Gidar smile thus on the waves at their feet.
In public Her face is averted, with anger. She nameth thy name.
It is well. Was there ever a loser content with the loss of the game?
XV.
If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips are sealed,
And the Brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret revealed.
If She have written a letter, delay not an instant, but burn it.
Tear it to pieces, O Fool, and the wind to her mate shall return it!
If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear,
Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear.
XVI.
My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the last word--get out!
She has been there before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking in lore.
XVII.
If we fall in the race, though we win, the hoof-slide is scarred on the
course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin, remaineth forever Remorse.
XVIII.
"By all I am misunderstood!" if the Matron shall say, or the Maid:
"Alas! I do not understand," my son, be thou nowise afraid.
In vain in the sight of the Bird is the net of the Fowler displayed.
XIX.
My son, if I, Hafiz, the father, take hold of thy knees in my pain,
Demanding thy name on stamped paper, one day or one hour--refrain.
Are the links of thy fetters so light that thou cravest another man's chain?
THE GRAVE OF THE HUNDRED HEAD
There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.
A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.
Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.
They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face--
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race--
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.
For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven's gate.
The men of the First Shikaris
Marched till the break of day,
Till they came to the rebel village,
The village of Pabengmay--
A jingal covered the clearing,
Calthrops hampered the way.
Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Bidding them load with ball,
Halted a dozen rifles
Under the village wall;
Sent out a flanking-party
With Jemadar Hira Lal.
The men of the First Shikaris
Shouted and smote and slew,
Turning the grinning jingal
On to the howling crew.
The Jemadar's flanking-party
Butchered the folk who flew.
Long was the morn of slaughter,
Long was the list of slain,
Five score heads were taken,
Five score heads and twain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back to their grave again,
Each man bearing a basket
Red as his palms that day,
Red as the blazing village--
The village of Pabengmay,
And the "drip-drip-drip" from the baskets
Reddened the grass by the way.
They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man's chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.
Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below,
With the sword and the peacock-banner
That the world might behold and know.
Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris--
The price of a white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.
Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For the Burmans said
That a kullah's head
Must be paid for with heads five score.
There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.
THE MOON OF OTHER DAYS
Beneath the deep veranda's shade,
When bats begin to fly,
I sit me down and watch--alas!--
Another evening die.
Blood-red behind the sere ferash
She rises through the haze.
Sainted Diana! can that be
The Moon of Other Days?
Ah! shade of little Kitty Smith,
Sweet Saint of Kensington!
Say, was it ever thus at Home
The Moon of August shone,
When arm in arm we wandered long
Through Putney's evening haze,
And Hammersmith was Heaven beneath
The Moon of Other Days?
But Wandle's stream is Sutlej now,
And Putney's evening haze
The dust that half a hundred kine
Before my window raise.
Unkempt, unclean, athwart the mist
The seething city looms,
In place of Putney's golden gorse
The sickly babul blooms.
Glare down, old Hecate, through the dust,
And bid the pie-dog yell,
Draw from the drain its typhoid-germ,
From each bazaar its smell;
Yea, suck the fever from the tank
And sap my strength therewith:
Thank Heaven, you show a smiling face
To little Kitty Smith!
THE OVERLAND MAIL
(Foot-Service to the Hills)
In the name of the Empress of India, make way,
O Lords of the Jungle, wherever you roam.
The woods are astir at the close of the day--
We exiles are waiting for letters from Home.
Let the robber retreat--let the tiger turn tail--
In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail!
With a jingle of bells as the dusk gathers in,
He turns to the foot-path that heads up the hill--
The bags on his back and a cloth round his chin,
And, tucked in his waist-belt, the Post Office bill:
"Despatched on this date, as received by the rail,
Per runner, two bags of the Overland Mail."
Is the torrent in spate? He must ford it or swim.
Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff.
Does the tempest cry "Halt"? What are tempests to him?
The Service admits not a "but" or and "if."
While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail,
In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.
From aloe to rose-oak, from rose-oak to fir,
From level to upland, from upland to crest,
From rice-field to rock-ridge, from rock-ridge to spur,
Fly the soft sandalled feet, strains the brawny brown chest.
From rail to ravine--to the peak from the vale--
Up, up through the night goes the Overland Mail.
There's a speck on the hillside, a dot on the road--
A jingle of bells on the foot-path below--
There's a scuffle above in the monkey's abode--
The world is awake, and the clouds are aglow.
For the great Sun himself must attend to the hail:
"In the name of the Empress the Overland Mail!"
WHAT THE PEOPLE SAID
June 21st, 1887
By the well, where the bullocks go
Silent and blind and slow--
By the field where the young corn dies
In the face of the sultry skies,
They have heard, as the dull Earth hears
The voice of the wind of an hour,
The sound of the Great Queen's voice:
"My God hath given me years,
Hath granted dominion and power:
And I bid you, O Land, rejoice."
And the ploughman settles the share
More deep in the grudging clod;
For he saith: "The wheat is my care,
And the rest is the will of God.
He sent the Mahratta spear
As He sendeth the rain,
And the Mlech, in the fated year,
Broke the spear in twain.
And was broken in turn. Who knows
How our Lords make strife?
It is good that the young wheat grows,
For the bread is Life."
Then, far and near, as the twilight drew,
Hissed up to the scornful dark
Great serpents, blazing, of red and blue,
That rose and faded, and rose anew.
That the Land might wonder and mark
"Today is a day of days," they said,
"Make merry, O People, all!"
And the Ploughman listened and bowed his head:
"Today and tomorrow God's will," he said,
As he trimmed the lamps on the wall.
"He sendeth us years that are good,
As He sendeth the dearth,
He giveth to each man his food,
Or Her food to the Earth.
Our Kings and our Queens are afar--
On their peoples be peace--
God bringeth the rain to the Bar,
That our cattle increase."
And the Ploughman settled the share
More deep in the sun-dried clod:
"Mogul Mahratta, and Mlech from the North,
And White Queen over the Seas--
God raiseth them up and driveth them forth
As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze;
But the wheat and the cattle are all my care,
And the rest is the will of God."
THE UNDERTAKER'S HORSE
"To-tschin-shu is condemned to death.
How can he drink tea with the Executioner?"
Japanese Proverb.
The eldest son bestrides him,
And the pretty daughter rides him,
And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course;
And there kindles in my bosom
An emotion chill and gruesome
As I canter past the Undertaker's Horse.
Neither shies he nor is restive,
But a hideously suggestive
Trot, professional and placid, he affects;
And the cadence of his hoof-beats
To my mind this grim reproof beats:--
"Mend your pace, my friend, I'm coming. Who's the next?"
Ah! stud-bred of ill-omen,
I have watched the strongest go--men
Of pith and might and muscle--at your heels,
Down the plantain-bordered highway,
(Heaven send it ne'er be my way!)
In a lacquered box and jetty upon wheels.
Answer, sombre beast and dreary,
Where is Brown, the young, the cheery,
Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force?
You were at that last dread dak
We must cover at a walk,
Bring them back to me, O Undertaker's Horse!
With your mane unhogged and flowing,
And your curious way of going,
And that businesslike black crimping of your tail,
E'en with Beauty on your back, Sir,
Pacing as a lady's hack, Sir,
What wonder when I meet you I turn pale?
It may be you wait your time, Beast,
Till I write my last bad rhyme, Beast--
Quit the sunlight, cut the rhyming, drop the glass--
Follow after with the others,
Where some dusky heathen smothers
Us with marigolds in lieu of English grass.
Or, perchance, in years to follow,
I shall watch your plump sides hollow,
See Carnifex (gone lame) become a corse--
See old age at last o'erpower you,
And the Station Pack devour you,
I shall chuckle then, O Undertaker's Horse!
But to insult, jibe, and quest, I've
Still the hideously suggestive
Trot that hammers out the unrelenting text,
And I hear it hard behind me
In what place soe'er I find me:--
"'Sure to catch you sooner or later. Who's the next?"
THE FALL OF JOCK GILLESPIE
This fell when dinner-time was done--
'Twixt the first an' the second rub--
That oor mon Jock cam' hame again
To his rooms ahist the Club.
An' syne he laughed, an' syne he sang,
An' syne we thocht him fou,
An' syne he trumped his partner's trick,
An' garred his partner rue.
Then up and spake an elder mon,
That held the Spade its Ace--
"God save the lad! Whence comes the licht
"That wimples on his face?"
An' Jock he sniggered, an' Jock he smiled,
An' ower the card-brim wunk:--
"I'm a' too fresh fra' the stirrup-peg,
"May be that I am drunk."
"There's whusky brewed in Galashils
"An' L. L. L. forbye;
"But never liquor lit the lowe
"That keeks fra' oot your eye.
"There's a third o' hair on your dress-coat breast,
"Aboon the heart a wee?"
"Oh! that is fra' the lang-haired Skye
"That slobbers ower me."
"Oh! lang-haired Skyes are lovin' beasts,
"An' terrier dogs are fair,
"But never yet was terrier born,
"Wi' ell-lang gowden hair!
"There's a smirch o' pouther on your breast,
"Below the left lappel?"
"Oh! that is fra' my auld cigar,
"Whenas the stump-end fell."
"Mon Jock, ye smoke the Trichi coarse,
"For ye are short o' cash,
"An' best Havanas couldna leave
"Sae white an' pure an ash.
"This nicht ye stopped a story braid,
"An' stopped it wi' a curse.
"Last nicht ye told that tale yoursel'--
"An' capped it wi' a worse!
"Oh! we're no fou! Oh! we're no fou!
"But plainly we can ken
"Ye're fallin', fallin' fra the band
"O' cantie single men!"
An' it fell when sirris-shaws were sere,
An' the nichts were lang and mirk,
In braw new breeks, wi' a gowden ring,
Oor Jock gaed to the Kirk!
ARITHMETIC ON THE FRONTIER
A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe--
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre!"
And after--ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station--
A canter down some dark defile--
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail--
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can--
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap--alas! as we are dear.
THE BETROTHED
"You must choose between me and your cigar."
--BREACH OF PROMISE CASE, CIRCA 1885.
Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,
For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.
We quarrelled about Havanas--we fought o'er a good cheroot,
And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.
Open the old cigar-box--let me consider a space;
In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie's face.
Maggie is pretty to look at--Maggie's a loving lass,
But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.
There's peace in a Larranaga, there's calm in a Henry Clay;
But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away--
Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown--
But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o' the talk o' the town!
Maggie, my wife at fifty--grey and dour and old--
With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!
And the light of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are,
And Love's torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar--
The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket--
With never a new one to light tho' it's charred and black to the socket!
Open the old cigar-box--let me consider a while.
Here is a mild Manila--there is a wifely smile.
Which is the better portion--bondage bought with a ring,
Or a harem of dusky beauties, fifty tied in a string?
Counsellors cunning and silent--comforters true and tried,
And never a one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride?
Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,
Peace in the hush of the twilight, balm ere my eyelids close,
This will the fifty give me, asking nought in return,
With only a Suttee's passion--to do their duty and burn.
This will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead,
Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.
The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,
When they hear my harem is empty will send me my brides again.
I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,
So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.
I will scent 'em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides,
And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.
For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between
The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o' Teen.
And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear,
But I have been Priest of Cabanas a matter of seven year;
And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light
Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.
And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,
But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o'-the-Wisp of Love.
Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?
Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?
Open the old cigar-box--let me consider anew--
Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
Light me another Cuba--I hold to my first-sworn vows.
If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for Spouse!
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Where the sober-colored cultivator smiles
On his byles;
Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow
Come and go;
Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea,
Hides and ghi;
Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints
In his prints;
Stands a City--Charnock chose it--packed away
Near a Bay--
By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer
Made impure,
By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp
Moist and damp;
And the City and the Viceroy, as we see,
Don't agree.
Once, two hundred years ago, the trader came
Meek and tame.
Where his timid foot first halted, there he stayed,
Till mere trade
Grew to Empire, and he sent his armies forth
South and North
Till the country from Peshawur to Ceylon
Was his own.
Thus the midday halt of Charnock--more's the pity!
Grew a City.
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,
So it spread--
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built
On the silt--
Palace, byre, hovel--poverty and pride--
Side by side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
Death looked down.
But the Rulers in that City by the Sea
Turned to flee--
Fled, with each returning spring-tide from its ills
To the Hills.
From the clammy fogs of morning, from the blaze
Of old days,
From the sickness of the noontide, from the heat,
Beat retreat;
For the country from Peshawur to Ceylon
Was their own.
But the Merchant risked the perils of the Plain
For his gain.
Now the resting-place of Charnock, 'neath the palms,
Asks an alms,
And the burden of its lamentation is,
Briefly, this:
"Because for certain months, we boil and stew,
So should you.
Cast the Viceroy and his Council, to perspire
In our fire!"
And for answer to the argument, in vain
We explain
That an amateur Saint Lawrence cannot fry:
"All must fry!"
That the Merchant risks the perils of the Plain
For gain.
Nor can Rulers rule a house that men grow rich in,
From its kitchen.
Let the Babu drop inflammatory hints
In his prints;
And mature--consistent soul--his plan for stealing
To Darjeeling:
Let the Merchant seek, who makes his silver pile,
England's isle;
Let the City Charnock pitched on--evil day!
Go Her way.
Though the argosies of Asia at Her doors
Heap their stores,
Though Her enterprise and energy secure
Income sure,
Though "out-station orders punctually obeyed"
Swell Her trade--
Still, for rule, administration, and the rest,
Simla's best.
The End
* * * * * * * *
VOLUME II BALLADS AND BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS
BALLADS
THE BALLAD OF EAST AND WEST
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall
meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment
Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border-side,
And he has lifted the Colonel's mare that is the Colonel's pride:
He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day,
And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.
Then up and spoke the Colonel's son that led a troop of the Guides:
"Is there never a man of all my men can say where Kamal hides?"
Then up and spoke Mahommed Khan, the son of the Ressaldar:
"If ye know the track of the morning-mist, ye know where his pickets are.
"At dusk he harries the Abazai--at dawn he is into Bonair,
But he must go by Fort Bukloh to his own place to fare,
So if ye gallop to Fort Bukloh as fast as a bird can fly,
By the favour of God ye may cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai.
"But if he be past the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then,
For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men.
There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between,
And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen."
The Colonel's son has taken a horse, and a raw rough dun was he,
With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of the gallows-
tree.
The Colonel's son to the Fort has won, they bid him stay to eat--
Who rides at the tail of a Border thief, he sits not long at his meat.
He's up and away from Fort Bukloh as fast as he can fly,
Till he was aware of his father's mare in the gut of the Tongue of Jagai,
Till he was aware of his father's mare with Kamal upon her back,
And when he could spy the white of her eye, he made the pistol crack.
He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide.
"Ye shoot like a soldier," Kamal said. "Show now if ye can ride."
It's up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown dustdevils go,
The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare like a barren doe.
The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above,
But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a glove.
There was rock to the left and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between,
And thrice he heard a breech-bolt snick tho' never a man was seen.
They have ridden the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn,
The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn.
The dun he fell at a water-course--in a woful heap fell he,
And Kamal has turned the red mare back, and pulled the rider free.
He has knocked the pistol out of his hand--small room was there to strive,
"'Twas only by favour of mine," quoth he, "ye rode so long alive:
There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,
But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.
"If I had raised my bridle-hand, as I have held it low,
The little jackals that flee so fast were feasting all in a row:
If I had bowed my head on my breast, as I have held it high,
The kite that whistles above us now were gorged till she could not fly."
Lightly answered the Colonel's son: "Do good to bird and beast,
But count who come for the broken meats before thou makest a feast.
"If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away,
Belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay.
"They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered
grain,
The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain.
"But if thou thinkest the price be fair,--thy brethren wait to sup,
The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,--howl, dog, and call them up!
And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack,
Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way back!"
Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet.
"No talk shall be of dogs," said he, "when wolf and gray wolf meet.
"May I eat dirt if thou hast hurt of me in deed or breath;
What dam of lances brought thee forth to jest at the dawn with Death?"
Lightly answered the Colonel's son: "I hold by the blood of my clan:
Take up the mare for my father's gift--by God, she has carried a man!"
The red mare ran to the Colonel's son, and nuzzled against his breast;
"We be two strong men," said Kamal then, "but she loveth the younger best.
So she shall go with a lifter's dower, my turquoise-studded rein,
My broidered saddle and saddle-cloth, and silver stirrups twain."
The Colonel's son a pistol drew and held it muzzle-end,
"Ye have taken the one from a foe," said he;
"will ye take the mate from a friend?"
"A gift for a gift," said Kamal straight; "a limb for the risk of a limb.
"Thy father has sent his son to me, I'll send my son to him!"
With that he whistled his only son, that dropped from a mountain-crest--
He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like a lance in rest.
"Now here is thy master," Kamal said, "who leads a troop of the Guides,
And thou must ride at his left side as shield on shoulder rides.
Till Death or I cut loose the tie, at camp and board and bed,
Thy life is his--thy fate it is to guard him with thy head.
"So, thou must eat the White Queen's meat, and all her foes are thine,
And thou must harry thy father's hold for the peace of the Border-line,
And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power--
Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged in Peshawur."
They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.
The Colonel's son he rides the mare and Kamal's boy the dun,
And two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.
And when they drew to the Quarter-Guard, full twenty swords flew clear--
There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer.
"Ha' done! ha' done!" said the Colonel's son.
"Put up the steel at your sides!
Last night ye had struck at a Border thief--
tonight 'tis a man of the Guides!"
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
THE LAST SUTTEE
Not many years ago a King died in one of the Rajpoot States. His wives,
disregarding the orders of the English against Suttee, would have broken out
of the palace had not the gates been barred.
But one of them, disguised as the King's favourite dancing-girl, passed
through the line of guards and reached the pyre. There, her courage failing,
she prayed her cousin, a baron of the court, to kill her. This he did, not
knowing who she was.
Udai Chand lay sick to death
In his hold by Gungra hill.
All night we heard the death-gongs ring
For the soul of the dying Rajpoot King,
All night beat up from the women's wing
A cry that we could not still.
All night the barons came and went,
The lords of the outer guard:
All night the cressets glimmered pale
On Ulwar sabre and Tonk jezail,
Mewar headstall and Marwar mail,
That clinked in the palace yard.
In the Golden room on the palace roof
All night he fought for air:
And there was sobbing behind the screen,
Rustle and whisper of women unseen,
And the hungry eyes of the Boondi Queen
On the death she might not share.
He passed at dawn--the death-fire leaped
From ridge to river-head,
From the Malwa plains to the Abu scars:
And wail upon wail went up to the stars
Behind the grim zenana-bars,
When they knew that the King was dead.
The dumb priest knelt to tie his mouth
And robe him for the pyre.
The Boondi Queen beneath us cried:
"See, now, that we die as our mothers died
In the bridal-bed by our master's side!
Out, women!--to the fire!"
We drove the great gates home apace:
White hands were on the sill:
But ere the rush of the unseen feet
Had reached the turn to the open street,
The bars shot down, the guard-drum beat--
We held the dovecot still.
A face looked down in the gathering day,
And laughing spoke from the wall:
"Ohe', they mourn here: let me by--
Azizun, the Lucknow nautch-girl, I!
When the house is rotten, the rats must fly,
And I seek another thrall.
"For I ruled the King as ne'er did Queen,--
Tonight the Queens rule me!
Guard them safely, but let me go,
Or ever they pay the debt they owe
In scourge and torture!" She leaped below,
And the grim guard watched her flee.
They knew that the King had spent his soul
On a North-bred dancing-girl:
That he prayed to a flat-nosed Lucknow god,
And kissed the ground where her feet had trod,
And doomed to death at her drunken nod,
And swore by her lightest curl.
We bore the King to his fathers' place,
Where the tombs of the Sun-born stand:
Where the gray apes swing, and the peacocks preen
On fretted pillar and jewelled screen,
And the wild boar couch in the house of the Queen
On the drift of the desert sand.
The herald read his titles forth,
We set the logs aglow:
"Friend of the English, free from fear,
Baron of Luni to Jeysulmeer,
Lord of the Desert of Bikaneer,
King of the Jungle,--go!"
All night the red flame stabbed the sky
With wavering wind-tossed spears:
And out of a shattered temple crept
A woman who veiled her head and wept,
And called on the King--but the great King slept,
And turned not for her tears.
Small thought had he to mark the strife--
Cold fear with hot desire--
When thrice she leaped from the leaping flame,
And thrice she beat her breast for shame,
And thrice like a wounded dove she came
And moaned about the fire.
One watched, a bow-shot from the blaze,
The silent streets between,
Who had stood by the King in sport and fray,
To blade in ambush or boar at bay,
And he was a baron old and gray,
And kin to the Boondi Queen.
He said: "O shameless, put aside
The veil upon thy brow!
Who held the King and all his land
To the wanton will of a harlot's hand!
Will the white ash rise from the blistered brand?
Stoop down, and call him now!"
Then she: "By the faith of my tarnished soul,
All things I did not well,
I had hoped to clear ere the fire died,
And lay me down by my master's side
To rule in Heaven his only bride,
While the others howl in Hell.
"But I have felt the fire's breath,
And hard it is to die!
Yet if I may pray a Rajpoot lord
To sully the steel of a Thakur's sword
With base-born blood of a trade abhorred,"--
And the Thakur answered, "Ay."
He drew and struck: the straight blade drank
The life beneath the breast.
"I had looked for the Queen to face the flame,
But the harlot dies for the Rajpoot dame--
Sister of mine, pass, free from shame,
Pass with thy King to rest!"
The black log crashed above the white:
The little flames and lean,
Red as slaughter and blue as steel,
That whistled and fluttered from head to heel,
Leaped up anew, for they found their meal
On the heart of--the Boondi Queen!
THE BALLAD OF THE KING'S MERCY
Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief,
of him is the story told.
His mercy fills the Khyber hills--
his grace is manifold;
He has taken toll of the North and the South--
his glory reacheth far,
And they tell the tale of his charity
from Balkh to Kandahar.
Before the old Peshawur Gate, where Kurd and Kaffir meet,
The Governor of Kabul dealt the Justice of the Street,
And that was strait as running noose and swift as plunging knife,
Tho' he who held the longer purse might hold the longer life.
There was a hound of Hindustan had struck a Euzufzai,
Wherefore they spat upon his face and led him out to die.
It chanced the King went forth that hour when throat was bared to knife;
The Kaffir grovelled under-hoof and clamoured for his life.
Then said the King: "Have hope, O friend! Yea, Death disgraced is hard;
Much honour shall be thine"; and called the Captain of the Guard,
Yar Khan, a bastard of the Blood, so city-babble saith,
And he was honoured of the King--the which is salt to Death;
And he was son of Daoud Shah, the Reiver of the Plains,
And blood of old Durani Lords ran fire in his veins;
And 'twas to tame an Afghan pride nor Hell nor Heaven could bind,
The King would make him butcher to a yelping cur of Hind.
"Strike!" said the King. "King's blood art thou--his death shall be his
pride!"
Then louder, that the crowd might catch: "Fear not--his arms are tied!"
Yar Khan drew clear the Khyber knife, and struck, and sheathed again.
"O man, thy will is done," quoth he; "a King this dog hath slain."
Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief,
to the North and the South is sold.
The North and the South shall open their mouth
to a Ghilzai flag unrolled,
When the big guns speak to the Khyber peak,
and his dog-Heratis fly:
Ye have heard the song--How long? How long?
Wolves of the Abazai!
That night before the watch was set, when all the streets were clear,
The Governor of Kabul spoke: "My King, hast thou no fear?
Thou knowest--thou hast heard,"--his speech died at his master's face.
And grimly said the Afghan King: "I rule the Afghan race.
My path is mine--see thou to thine--tonight upon thy bed
Think who there be in Kabul now that clamour for thy head."
That night when all the gates were shut to City and to throne,
Within a little garden-house the King lay down alone.
Before the sinking of the moon, which is the Night of Night,
Yar Khan came softly to the King to make his honour white.
The children of the town had mocked beneath his horse's hoofs,
The harlots of the town had hailed him "butcher!" from their roofs.
But as he groped against the wall, two hands upon him fell,
The King behind his shoulder spake: "Dead man, thou dost not well!
'Tis ill to jest with Kings by day and seek a boon by night;
And that thou bearest in thy hand is all too sharp to write.
"But three days hence, if God be good, and if thy strength remain,
Thou shalt demand one boon of me and bless me in thy pain.
For I am merciful to all, and most of all to thee.
"My butcher of the shambles, rest--no knife hast thou for me!"
Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief,
holds hard by the South and the North;
But the Ghilzai knows, ere the melting snows,
when the swollen banks break forth,
When the red-coats crawl to the sungar wall,
and his Usbeg lances fail:
Ye have heard the song--How long? How long?
Wolves of the Zuka Kheyl!
They stoned him in the rubbish-field when dawn was in the sky,
According to the written word, "See that he do not die."
They stoned him till the stones were piled above him on the plain,
And those the labouring limbs displaced they tumbled back again.
One watched beside the dreary mound that veiled the battered
thing,
And him the King with laughter called the Herald of the King.
It was upon the second night, the night of Ramazan,
The watcher leaning earthward heard the message of Yar Khan.
From shattered breast through shrivelled lips broke forth the rattling breath,
"Creature of God, deliver me from agony of Death."
They sought the King among his girls, and risked their lives thereby:
"Protector of the Pitiful, give orders that he die!"
"Bid him endure until the day," a lagging answer came;
"The night is short, and he can pray and learn to bless my name."
Before the dawn three times he spoke, and on the day once more:
"Creature of God, deliver me, and bless the King therefor!"
They shot him at the morning prayer, to ease him of his pain,
And when he heard the matchlocks clink, he blessed the King again.
Which thing the singers made a song for all the world to sing,
So that the Outer Seas may know the mercy of the King.
Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief,
of him is the story told,
He has opened his mouth to the North and the South,
they have stuffed his mouth with gold.
Ye know the truth of his tender ruth--
and sweet his favours are:
Ye have heard the song--How long? How long?
from Balkh to Kandahar.
THE BALLAD OF THE KING'S JEST
When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.
In a turquoise twilight, crisp and chill,
A kafila camped at the foot of the hill.
Then blue smoke-haze of the cooking rose,
And tent-peg answered to hammer-nose;
And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,
Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled;
And the bubbling camels beside the load
Sprawled for a furlong adown the road;
And the Persian pussy-cats, brought for sale,
Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale;
And the tribesmen bellowed to hasten the food;
And the camp-fires twinkled by Fort Jumrood;
And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk
A savour of camels and carpets and musk,
A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke,
To tell us the trade of the Khyber woke.
The lid of the flesh-pot chattered high,
The knives were whetted and--then came I
To Mahbub Ali the muleteer,
Patching his bridles and counting his gear,
Crammed with the gossip of half a year.
But Mahbub Ali the kindly said,
"Better is speech when the belly is fed."
So we plunged the hand to the mid-wrist deep
In a cinnamon stew of the fat-tailed sheep,
And he who never hath tasted the food,
By Allah! he knoweth not bad from good.
We cleansed our beards of the mutton-grease,
We lay on the mats and were filled with peace,
And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south,
With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth.
Four things greater than all things are,--
Women and Horses and Power and War.
We spake of them all, but the last the most,
For I sought a word of a Russian post,
Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword
And a gray-coat guard on the Helmund ford.
Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes
In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.
Quoth he: "Of the Russians who can say?
When the night is gathering all is gray.
But we look that the gloom of the night shall die
In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.
"Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
"That unsought counsel is cursed of God
Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.
"His sire was leaky of tongue and pen,
His dam was a clucking Khuttuck hen;
And the colt bred close to the vice of each,
For he carried the curse of an unstanched speech.
"Therewith madness--so that he sought
The favour of kings at the Kabul court;
And travelled, in hope of honour, far
To the line where the gray-coat squadrons are.
"There have I journeyed too--but I
Saw naught, said naught, and--did not die!
He harked to rumour, and snatched at a breath
Of 'this one knoweth' and 'that one saith',--
Legends that ran from mouth to mouth
Of a gray-coat coming, and sack of the South.
"These have I also heard--they pass
With each new spring and the winter grass.
"Hot-foot southward, forgotten of God,
Back to the city ran Wali Dad,
Even to Kabul--in full durbar
The King held talk with his Chief in War.
"Into the press of the crowd he broke,
And what he had heard of the coming spoke.
"Then Gholam Hyder, the Red Chief, smiled,
As a mother might on a babbling child;
But those who would laugh restrained their breath,
When the face of the King showed dark as death.
"Evil it is in full durbar
To cry to a ruler of gathering war!
Slowly he led to a peach-tree small,
That grew by a cleft of the city wall.
"And he said to the boy: 'They shall praise thy zeal
So long as the red spurt follows the steel.
"And the Russ is upon us even now?
Great is thy prudence--await them, thou.
Watch from the tree. Thou art young and strong,
Surely thy vigil is not for long.
"The Russ is upon us, thy clamour ran?
Surely an hour shall bring their van.
Wait and watch. When the host is near,
Shout aloud that my men may hear.'
"Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
A guard was set that he might not flee--
A score of bayonets ringed the tree.
"The peach-bloom fell in showers of snow,
When he shook at his death as he looked below.
By the power of God, who alone is great,
Till the seventh day he fought with his fate.
"Then madness took him, and men declare
He mowed in the branches as ape and bear,
And last as a sloth, ere his body failed,
And he hung as a bat in the forks, and wailed,
And sleep the cord of his hands untied,
And he fell, and was caught on the points and died.
"Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
"Of the gray-coat coming who can say?
When the night is gathering all is gray.
"To things greater than all things are,
The first is Love, and the second War.
"And since we know not how War may prove,
Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love!"
THE BALLAD OF BOH DA THONE
This is the ballad of Boh Da Thone,
Erst a Pretender to Theebaw's throne,
Who harried the district of Alalone:
How he met with his fate and the V.P.P.
At the hand of Harendra Mukerji,
Senior Gomashta, G.B.T.
Boh Da Thone was a warrior bold:
His sword and his Snider were bossed with gold,
And the Peacock Banner his henchmen bore
Was stiff with bullion, but stiffer with gore.
He shot at the strong and he slashed at the weak
From the Salween scrub to the Chindwin teak:
He crucified noble, he sacrificed mean,
He filled old ladies with kerosene:
While over the water the papers cried,
"The patriot fights for his countryside!"
But little they cared for the Native Press,
The worn white soldiers in Khaki dress,
Who tramped through the jungle and camped in the byre,
Who died in the swamp and were tombed in the mire,
Who gave up their lives, at the Queen's Command,
For the Pride of their Race and the Peace of the Land.
Now, first of the foemen of Boh Da Thone
Was Captain O'Neil of the "Black Tyrone",
And his was a Company, seventy strong,
Who hustled that dissolute Chief along.
There were lads from Galway and Louth and Meath
Who went to their death with a joke in their teeth,
And worshipped with fluency, fervour, and zeal
The mud on the boot-heels of "Crook" O'Neil.
But ever a blight on their labours lay,
And ever their quarry would vanish away,
Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone
Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone:
And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends,
The Boh and his trackers were best of friends.
The word of a scout--a march by night--
A rush through the mist--a scattering fight--
A volley from cover--a corpse in the clearing--
The glimpse of a loin-cloth and heavy jade earring--
The flare of a village--the tally of slain--
And. . .the Boh was abroad "on the raid" again!
They cursed their luck, as the Irish will,
They gave him credit for cunning and skill,
They buried their dead, they bolted their beef,
And started anew on the track of the thief
Till, in place of the "Kalends of Greece", men said,
"When Crook and his darlings come back with the head."
They had hunted the Boh from the hills to the plain--
He doubled and broke for the hills again:
They had crippled his power for rapine and raid,
They had routed him out of his pet stockade,
And at last, they came, when the Day Star tired,
To a camp deserted--a village fired.
A black cross blistered the Morning-gold,
And the body upon it was stark and cold.
The wind of the dawn went merrily past,
The high grass bowed her plumes to the blast.
And out of the grass, on a sudden, broke
A spirtle of fire, a whorl of smoke--
And Captain O'Neil of the Black Tyrone
Was blessed with a slug in the ulnar-bone--
The gift of his enemy Boh Da Thone.
(Now a slug that is hammered from telegraph-wire
Is a thorn in the flesh and a rankling fire.)
* * * * *
The shot-wound festered--as shot-wounds may
In a steaming barrack at Mandalay.
The left arm throbbed, and the Captain swore,
"I'd like to be after the Boh once more!"
The fever held him--the Captain said,
"I'd give a hundred to look at his head!"
The Hospital punkahs creaked and whirred,
But Babu Harendra (Gomashta) heard.
He thought of the cane-brake, green and dank,
That girdled his home by the Dacca tank.
He thought of his wife and his High School son,
He thought--but abandoned the thought--of a gun.
His sleep was broken by visions dread
Of a shining Boh with a silver head.
He kept his counsel and went his way,
And swindled the cartmen of half their pay.
* * * * *
And the months went on, as the worst must do,
And the Boh returned to the raid anew.
But the Captain had quitted the long-drawn strife,
And in far Simoorie had taken a wife.
And she was a damsel of delicate mould,
With hair like the sunshine and heart of gold,
And little she knew the arms that embraced
Had cloven a man from the brow to the waist:
And little she knew that the loving lips
Had ordered a quivering life's eclipse,
And the eye that lit at her lightest breath
Had glared unawed in the Gates of Death.
(For these be matters a man would hide,
As a general rule, from an innocent Bride.)
And little the Captain thought of the past,
And, of all men, Babu Harendra last.
* * * * *
But slow, in the sludge of the Kathun road,
The Government Bullock Train toted its load.
Speckless and spotless and shining with ghee,
In the rearmost cart sat the Babu-jee.
And ever a phantom before him fled
Of a scowling Boh with a silver head.
Then the lead-cart stuck, though the coolies slaved,
And the cartmen flogged and the escort raved;
And out of the jungle, with yells and squeals,
Pranced Boh Da Thone, and his gang at his heels!
Then belching blunderbuss answered back
The Snider's snarl and the carbine's crack,
And the blithe revolver began to sing
To the blade that twanged on the locking-ring,
And the brown flesh blued where the bay'net kissed,
As the steel shot back with a wrench and a twist,
And the great white bullocks with onyx eyes
Watched the souls of the dead arise,
And over the smoke of the fusillade
The Peacock Banner staggered and swayed.
Oh, gayest of scrimmages man may see
Is a well-worked rush on the G.B.T.!
The Babu shook at the horrible sight,
And girded his ponderous loins for flight,
But Fate had ordained that the Boh should start
On a lone-hand raid of the rearmost cart,
And out of that cart, with a bellow of woe,
The Babu fell--flat on the top of the Boh!
For years had Harendra served the State,
To the growth of his purse and the girth of his _pet_.
There were twenty stone, as the tally-man knows,
On the broad of the chest of this best of Bohs.
And twenty stone from a height discharged
Are bad for a Boh with a spleen enlarged.
Oh, short was the struggle--severe was the shock--
He dropped like a bullock--he lay like a block;
And the Babu above him, convulsed with fear,
Heard the labouring life-breath hissed out in his ear.
And thus in a fashion undignified
The princely pest of the Chindwin died.
* * * * *
Turn now to Simoorie where, lapped in his ease,
The Captain is petting the Bride on his knees,
Where the whit of the bullet, the wounded man's scream
Are mixed as the mist of some devilish dream--
Forgotten, forgotten the sweat of the shambles
Where the hill-daisy blooms and the gray monkey gambols,
From the sword-belt set free and released from the steel,
The Peace of the Lord is with Captain O'Neil.
* * * * *
Up the hill to Simoorie--most patient of drudges--
The bags on his shoulder, the mail-runner trudges.
"For Captain O'Neil, Sahib. One hundred and ten
Rupees to collect on delivery."
Then
(Their breakfast was stopped while the screw-jack and hammer
Tore waxcloth, split teak-wood, and chipped out the dammer;)
Open-eyed, open-mouthed, on the napery's snow,
With a crash and a thud, rolled--the Head of the Boh!
And gummed to the scalp was a letter which ran:--
"IN FIELDING FORCE SERVICE.
Encampment,
--th Jan.
"Dear Sir,--I have honour to send, as you said,
For final approval (see under) Boh's Head;
"Was took by myself in most bloody affair.
By High Education brought pressure to bear.
"Now violate Liberty, time being bad,
To mail V.P.P. (rupees hundred) Please add
"Whatever Your Honour can pass. Price of Blood
Much cheap at one hundred, and children want food;
"So trusting Your Honour will somewhat retain
True love and affection for Govt. Bullock Train,
"And show awful kindness to satisfy me,
I am,
Graceful Master,
Your
H. MUKERJI."
* * * * *
As the rabbit is drawn to the rattlesnake's power,
As the smoker's eye fills at the opium hour,
As a horse reaches up to the manger above,
As the waiting ear yearns for the whisper of love,
From the arms of the Bride, iron-visaged and slow,
The Captain bent down to the Head of the Boh.
And e'en as he looked on the Thing where It lay
'Twixt the winking new spoons and the napkins' array,
The freed mind fled back to the long-ago days--
The hand-to-hand scuffle--the smoke and the blaze--
The forced march at night and the quick rush at dawn--
The banjo at twilight, the burial ere morn--
The stench of the marshes--the raw, piercing smell
When the overhand stabbing-cut silenced the yell--
The oaths of his Irish that surged when they stood
Where the black crosses hung o'er the Kuttamow flood.
As a derelict ship drifts away with the tide
The Captain went out on the Past from his Bride,
Back, back, through the springs to the chill of the year,
When he hunted the Boh from Maloon to Tsaleer.
As the shape of a corpse dimmers up through deep water,
In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter,
And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life
Had gazed on his face with less dread than his wife.
For she who had held him so long could not hold him--
Though a four-month Eternity should have controlled him--
But watched the twin Terror--the head turned to head--
The scowling, scarred Black, and the flushed savage Red--
The spirit that changed from her knowing and flew to
Some grim hidden Past she had never a clue to.
But It knew as It grinned, for he touched it unfearing,
And muttered aloud, "So you kept that jade earring!"
Then nodded, and kindly, as friend nods to friend,
"Old man, you fought well, but you lost in the end."
* * * * *
The visions departed, and Shame followed Passion:--
"He took what I said in this horrible fashion,
"I'll write to Harendra!" With language unsainted
The Captain came back to the Bride. . .who had fainted.
* * * * *
And this is a fiction? No. Go to Simoorie
And look at their baby, a twelve-month old Houri,
A pert little, Irish-eyed Kathleen Mavournin--
She's always about on the Mall of a mornin'--
And you'll see, if her right shoulder-strap is displaced,
This: Gules upon argent, a Boh's Head, erased!
THE LAMENT OF THE BORDER CATTLE THIEF
O woe is me for the merry life
I led beyond the Bar,
And a treble woe for my winsome wife
That weeps at Shalimar.
They have taken away my long jezail,
My shield and sabre fine,
And heaved me into the Central jail
For lifting of the kine.
The steer may low within the byre,
The Jat may tend his grain,
But there'll be neither loot nor fire
Till I come back again.
And God have mercy on the Jat
When once my fetters fall,
And Heaven defend the farmer's hut
When I am loosed from thrall.
It's woe to bend the stubborn back
Above the grinching quern,
It's woe to hear the leg-bar clack
And jingle when I turn!
But for the sorrow and the shame,
The brand on me and mine,
I'll pay you back in leaping flame
And loss of the butchered kine.
For every cow I spared before
In charity set free,
If I may reach my hold once more
I'll reive an honest three.
For every time I raised the low
That scared the dusty plain,
By sword and cord, by torch and tow
I'll light the land with twain!
Ride hard, ride hard to Abazai,
Young Sahib with the yellow hair--
Lie close, lie close as khuttucks lie,
Fat herds below Bonair!
The one I'll shoot at twilight-tide,
At dawn I'll drive the other;
The black shall mourn for hoof and hide,
The white man for his brother.
'Tis war, red war, I'll give you then,
War till my sinews fail;
For the wrong you have done to a chief of men,
And a thief of the Zukka Kheyl.
And if I fall to your hand afresh
I give you leave for the sin,
That you cram my throat with the foul pig's flesh,
And swing me in the skin!
THE RHYME OF THE THREE CAPTAINS
This ballad appears to refer to one of the exploits of the notorious Paul
Jones, the American pirate. It is founded on fact.
. . . At the close of a winter day,
Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay;
And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye,
And one was Lord of the Wessex coast and all the lands thereby,
And one was Master of the Thames from Limehouse to Blackwall,
And he was Captain of the Fleet--the bravest of them all.
Their good guns guarded their great gray sides that were thirty foot in the
sheer,
When there came a certain trading-brig with news of a privateer.
Her rigging was rough with the clotted drift that drives in a Northern breeze,
Her sides were clogged with the lazy weed that spawns in the Eastern seas.
Light she rode in the rude tide-rip, to left and right she rolled,
And the skipper sat on the scuttle-butt and stared at an empty hold.
"I ha' paid Port dues for your Law," quoth he, "and where is the Law ye boast
If I sail unscathed from a heathen port to be robbed on a Christian coast?
Ye have smoked the hives of the Laccadives as we burn the lice in a bunk,
We tack not now to a Gallang prow or a plunging Pei-ho junk;
I had no fear but the seas were clear as far as a sail might fare
Till I met with a lime-washed Yankee brig that rode off Finisterre.
"There were canvas blinds to his bow-gun ports to screen the weight he bore,
And the signals ran for a merchantman from Sandy Hook to the Nore.
"He would not fly the Rovers' flag--the bloody or the black,
But now he floated the Gridiron and now he flaunted the Jack.
He spoke of the Law as he crimped my crew--he swore it was only a loan;
But when I would ask for my own again, he swore it was none of my own.
"He has taken my little parrakeets that nest beneath the Line,
He has stripped my rails of the shaddock-frails and the green unripened pine;
He has taken my bale of dammer and spice I won beyond the seas,
He has taken my grinning heathen gods--and what should he want o' these?
My foremast would not mend his boom, my deckhouse patch his boats;
He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle for shoe-peg oats.
"I could not fight for the failing light and a rough beam-sea beside,
But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice because he lied.
"Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,
And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;
I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,
I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;
I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,
And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;
I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the
mesh,
And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened
flesh;
I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and
draws,
Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws!
He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow,
For he carries the taint of a musky ship--the reek of the slaver's dhow!"
The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and cold,
And the Captains Three full courteously peered down at the gutted hold,
And the Captains Three called courteously from deck to scuttle-butt:--
"Good Sir, we ha' dealt with that merchantman or ever your teeth were cut.
"Your words be words of a lawless race, and the Law it standeth thus:
He comes of a race that have never a Law, and he never has boarded us.
"We ha' sold him canvas and rope and spar--we know that his price is fair,
And we know that he weeps for the lack of a Law as he rides off Finisterre.
"And since he is damned for a gallows-thief by you and better than you,
We hold it meet that the English fleet should know that we hold him true."
The skipper called to the tall taffrail:--"And what is that to me?
Did ever you hear of a Yankee brig that rifled a Seventy-three?
Do I loom so large from your quarter-deck that I lift like a ship o' the Line?
He has learned to run from a shotted gun and harry such craft as mine.
"There is never a Law on the Cocos Keys to hold a white man in,
But we do not steal the niggers' meal, for that is a nigger's sin.
"Must he have his Law as a quid to chaw, or laid in brass on his wheel?
Does he steal with tears when he buccaneers? 'Fore Gad, then, why does he
steal?"
The skipper bit on a deep-sea word, and the word it was not sweet,
For he could see the Captains Three had signalled to the Fleet.
But three and two, in white and blue, the whimpering flags began:--
"We have heard a tale of a--foreign sail, but he is a merchantman."
The skipper peered beneath his palm and swore by the Great Horn Spoon:--
"'Fore Gad, the Chaplain of the Fleet would bless my picaroon!"
By two and three the flags blew free to lash the laughing air:--
"We have sold our spars to the merchantman--we know that his price is fair."
The skipper winked his Western eye, and swore by a China storm:--
"They ha' rigged him a Joseph's jury-coat to keep his honour warm."
The halliards twanged against the tops, the bunting bellied broad,
The skipper spat in the empty hold and mourned for a wasted cord.
Masthead--masthead, the signal sped by the line o' the British craft;
The skipper called to his Lascar crew, and put her about and laughed:--
"It's mainsail haul, my bully boys all--we'll out to the seas again--
Ere they set us to paint their pirate saint, or scrub at his grapnel-chain.
"It's fore-sheet free, with her head to the sea, and the swing of the unbought
brine--
We'll make no sport in an English court till we come as a ship o' the Line:
Till we come as a ship o' the Line, my lads, of thirty foot in the sheer,
Lifting again from the outer main with news of a privateer;
Flying his pluck at our mizzen-truck for weft of Admiralty,
Heaving his head for our dipsey-lead in sign that we keep the sea.
"Then fore-sheet home as she lifts to the foam--we stand on the outward tack,
We are paid in the coin of the white man's trade--the bezant is hard, ay, and
black.
"The frigate-bird shall carry my word to the Kling and the Orang-Laut
How a man may sail from a heathen coast to be robbed in a Christian port;
How a man may be robbed in Christian port while Three Great Captains there
Shall dip their flag to a slaver's rag--to show that his trade is fair!"
THE BALLAD OF THE CLAMPHERDOWN
It was our war-ship Clampherdown
Would sweep the Channel clean,
Wherefore she kept her hatches close
When the merry Channel chops arose,
To save the bleached marine.
She had one bow-gun of a hundred ton,
And a great stern-gun beside;
They dipped their noses deep in the sea,
They racked their stays and stanchions free
In the wash of the wind-whipped tide.
It was our war-ship Clampherdown,
Fell in with a cruiser light
That carried the dainty Hotchkiss gun
And a pair o' heels wherewith to run
From the grip of a close-fought fight.
She opened fire at seven miles--
As ye shoot at a bobbing cork--
And once she fired and twice she fired,
Till the bow-gun drooped like a lily tired
That lolls upon the stalk.
"Captain, the bow-gun melts apace,
The deck-beams break below,
'Twere well to rest for an hour or twain,
And patch the shattered plates again."
And he answered, "Make it so."
She opened fire within the mile--
As ye shoot at the flying duck--
And the great stern-gun shot fair and true,
With the heave of the ship, to the stainless blue,
And the great stern-turret stuck.
"Captain, the turret fills with steam,
The feed-pipes burst below--
You can hear the hiss of the helpless ram,
You can hear the twisted runners jam."
And he answered, "Turn and go!"
It was our war-ship Clampherdown,
And grimly did she roll;
Swung round to take the cruiser's fire
As the White Whale faces the Thresher's ire
When they war by the frozen Pole.
"Captain, the shells are falling fast,
And faster still fall we;
And it is not meet for English stock
To bide in the heart of an eight-day clock
The death they cannot see."
"Lie down, lie down, my bold A.B.,
We drift upon her beam;
We dare not ram, for she can run;
And dare ye fire another gun,
And die in the peeling steam?"
It was our war-ship Clampherdown
That carried an armour-belt;
But fifty feet at stern and bow
Lay bare as the paunch of the purser's sow,
To the hail of the Nordenfeldt.
"Captain, they hack us through and through;
The chilled steel bolts are swift!
We have emptied the bunkers in open sea,
Their shrapnel bursts where our coal should be."
And he answered, "Let her drift."
It was our war-ship Clampherdown,
Swung round upon the tide,
Her two dumb guns glared south and north,
And the blood and the bubbling steam ran forth,
And she ground the cruiser's side.
"Captain, they cry, the fight is done,
They bid you send your sword."
And he answered, "Grapple her stern and bow.
They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now;
Out cutlasses and board!"
It was our war-ship Clampherdown
Spewed up four hundred men;
And the scalded stokers yelped delight,
As they rolled in the waist and heard the fight
Stamp o'er their steel-walled pen.
They cleared the cruiser end to end,
From conning-tower to hold.
They fought as they fought in Nelson's fleet;
They were stripped to the waist, they were bare to the feet,
As it was in the days of old.
It was the sinking Clampherdown
Heaved up her battered side--
And carried a million pounds in steel,
To the cod and the corpse-fed conger-eel,
And the scour of the Channel tide.
It was the crew of the Clampherdown
Stood out to sweep the sea,
On a cruiser won from an ancient foe,
As it was in the days of long ago,
And as it still shall be.
THE BALLAD OF THE "BOLIVAR"
Seven men from all the world, back to Docks again,
Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:
Give the girls another drink 'fore we sign away--
We that took the Bolivar out across the Bay!
We put out from Sunderland loaded down with rails;
We put back to Sunderland 'cause our cargo shifted;
We put out from Sunderland--met the winter gales--
Seven days and seven nights to the Start we drifted.
Racketing her rivets loose, smoke-stack white as snow,
All the coals adrift adeck, half the rails below,
Leaking like a lobster-pot, steering like a dray--
Out we took the Bolivar, out across the Bay!
One by one the Lights came up, winked and let us by;
Mile by mile we waddled on, coal and fo'c'sle short;
Met a blow that laid us down, heard a bulkhead fly;
Left the Wolf behind us with a two-foot list to port.
Trailing like a wounded duck, working out her soul;
Clanging like a smithy-shop after every roll;
Just a funnel and a mast lurching through the spray--
So we threshed the Bolivar out across the Bay!
'Felt her hog and felt her sag, betted when she'd break;
Wondered every time she raced if she'd stand the shock;
Heard the seas like drunken men pounding at her strake;
Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block.
Banged against the iron decks, bilges choked with coal;
Flayed and frozen foot and hand, sick of heart and soul;
Last we prayed she'd buck herself into judgment Day--
Hi! we cursed the Bolivar--knocking round the Bay!
O her nose flung up to sky, groaning to be still--
Up and down and back we went, never time for breath;
Then the money paid at Lloyd's caught her by the heel,
And the stars ran round and round dancin' at our death.
Aching for an hour's sleep, dozing off between;
'Heard the rotten rivets draw when she took it green;
'Watched the compass chase its tail like a cat at play--
That was on the Bolivar, south across the Bay.
Once we saw between the squalls, lyin' head to swell--
Mad with work and weariness, wishin' they was we--
Some damned Liner's lights go by like a long hotel;
Cheered her from the Bolivar--swampin' in the sea.
Then a grayback cleared us out, then the skipper laughed;
"Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!
Yoke the kicking rudder-head--get her under way!"
So we steered her, pulley-haul, out across the Bay!
Just a pack o' rotten plates puttied up with tar,
In we came, an' time enough, 'cross Bilbao Bar.
Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, we
Euchred God Almighty's storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!
Seven men from all the world, back to town again,
Rollin' down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:
Seven men from out of Hell. Ain't the owners gay,
'Cause we took the "Bolivar" safe across the Bay?
THE ENGLISH FLAG
Above the portico a flag-staff, bearing the Union Jack,
remained fluttering in the flames for some time, but ultimately
when it fell the crowds rent the air with shouts,
and seemed to see significance in the incident.--DAILY PAPERS.
Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro--
And what should they know of England who only England know?--
The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag,
They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!
Must we borrow a clout from the Boer--to plaster anew with dirt?
An Irish liar's bandage, or an English coward's shirt?
We may not speak of England; her Flag's to sell or share.
What is the Flag of England? Winds of the World, declare!
The North Wind blew:--"From Bergen my steel-shod vanguards go;
I chase your lazy whalers home from the Disko floe;
By the great North Lights above me I work the will of God,
And the liner splits on the ice-field or the Dogger fills with cod.
"I barred my gates with iron, I shuttered my doors with flame,
Because to force my ramparts your nutshell navies came;
I took the sun from their presence, I cut them down with my blast,
And they died, but the Flag of England blew free ere the spirit passed.
"The lean white bear hath seen it in the long, long Arctic night,
The musk-ox knows the standard that flouts the Northern Light:
What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my bergs to dare,
Ye have but my drifts to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!"
The South Wind sighed:--"From the Virgins my mid-sea course was ta'en
Over a thousand islands lost in an idle main,
Where the sea-egg flames on the coral and the long-backed breakers croon
Their endless ocean legends to the lazy, locked lagoon.
"Strayed amid lonely islets, mazed amid outer keys,
I waked the palms to laughter--I tossed the scud in the breeze--
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown.
"I have wrenched it free from the halliard to hang for a wisp on the Horn;
I have chased it north to the Lizard--ribboned and rolled and torn;
I have spread its fold o'er the dying, adrift in a hopeless sea;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave set free.
"My basking sunfish know it, and wheeling albatross,
Where the lone wave fills with fire beneath the Southern Cross.
What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my reefs to dare,
Ye have but my seas to furrow. Go forth, for it is there!"
The East Wind roared:--"From the Kuriles, the Bitter Seas, I come,
And me men call the Home-Wind, for I bring the English home.
Look--look well to your shipping! By the breath of my mad typhoon
I swept your close-packed Praya and beached your best at Kowloon!
"The reeling junks behind me and the racing seas before,
I raped your richest roadstead--I plundered Singapore!
I set my hand on the Hoogli; as a hooded snake she rose,
And I flung your stoutest steamers to roost with the startled crows.
"Never the lotus closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England's sake--
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid--
Because on the bones of the English the English Flag is stayed.
"The desert-dust hath dimmed it, the flying wild-ass knows,
The scared white leopard winds it across the taintless snows.
What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my sun to dare,
Ye have but my sands to travel. Go forth, for it is there!"
The West Wind called:--"In squadrons the thoughtless galleons fly
That bear the wheat and cattle lest street-bred people die.
They make my might their porter, they make my house their path,
Till I loose my neck from their rudder and whelm them all in my wrath.
"I draw the gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole,
They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll,
For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath,
And they see strange bows above them and the two go locked to death.
"But whether in calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day,
I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away,
First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky,
Dipping between the rollers, the English Flag goes by.
"The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it--the frozen dews have kissed--
The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist.
What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!"
"CLEARED"
(In Memory of a Commission)
Help for a patriot distressed, a spotless spirit hurt,
Help for an honorable clan sore trampled in the dirt!
From Queenstown Bay to Donegal, O listen to my song,
The honorable gentlemen have suffered grievous wrong.
Their noble names were mentioned--O the burning black disgrace!--
By a brutal Saxon paper in an Irish shooting-case;
They sat upon it for a year, then steeled their heart to brave it,
And "coruscating innocence" the learned Judges gave it.
Bear witness, Heaven, of that grim crime beneath the surgeon's knife,
The honorable gentlemen deplored the loss of life;
Bear witness of those chanting choirs that burk and shirk and snigger,
No man laid hand upon the knife or finger to the trigger!
Cleared in the face of all mankind beneath the winking skies,
Like phoenixes from Phoenix Park (and what lay there) they rise!
Go shout it to the emerald seas-give word to Erin now,
Her honorable gentlemen are cleared--and this is how:
They only paid the Moonlighter his cattle-hocking price,
They only helped the murderer with council's best advice,
But--sure it keeps their honor white--the learned Court believes
They never gave a piece of plate to murderers and thieves.
They ever told the ramping crowd to card a woman's hide,
They never marked a man for death--what fault of theirs he died?--
They only said "intimidate," and talked and went away--
By God, the boys that did the work were braver men than they!
Their sin it was that fed the fire--small blame to them that heard
The "bhoys" get drunk on rhetoric, and madden at the word--
They knew whom they were talking at, if they were Irish too,
The gentlemen that lied in Court, they knew and well they knew.
They only took the Judas-gold from Fenians out of jail,
They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael.
If black is black or white is white, ill black and white it's down,
They're only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown.
"Cleared," honorable gentlemen. Be thankful it's no more:
The widow's curse is on your house, the dead are at your door.
On you the shame of open shame, on you from North to South
The band of every honest man flat-heeled across your mouth.
"Less black than we were painted"?--Faith, no word of black was said;
The lightest touch was human blood, and that, ye know, runs red.
It's sticking to your fist today for all your sneer and scoff,
And by the Judge's well-weighed word you cannot wipe it off.
Hold up those hands of innocence--go, scare your sheep, together,
The blundering, tripping tups that bleat behind the old bell-wether;
And if they snuff the taint and break to find another pen,
Tell them it's tar that glistens so, and daub them yours again!
"The charge is old"?--As old as Cain--as fresh as yesterday;
Old as the Ten Commandments, have ye talked those laws away?
If words are words, or death is death, or powder sends the ball,
You spoke the words that sped the shot--the curse be on you all.
"Our friends believe"? Of course they do--as sheltered women may;
But have they seen the shrieking soul ripped from the quivering clay?
They--If their own front door is shut, they'll swear the whole world's warm;
What do they know of dread of death or hanging fear of harm?
The secret half a country keeps, the whisper in the lane,
The shriek that tells the shot went home behind the broken pane,
The dry blood crisping in the sun that scares the honest bees,
And shows the "bhoys" have heard your talk--what do they know of these?
But you--you know--ay, ten times more; the secrets of the dead,
Black terror on the country-side by word and whisper bred,
The mangled stallion's scream at night, the tail-cropped heifer's low.
Who set the whisper going first? You know, and well you know!
My soul! I'd sooner lie in jail for murder plain and straight,
Pure crime I'd done with my own hand for money, lust, or hate,
Than take a seat in Parliament by fellow-felons cheered,
While one of those "not provens" proved me cleared as you are cleared.
Cleared--you that "lost" the League accounts--go, guard our honor still,
Go, help to make our country's laws that broke God's laws at will--
One hand stuck out behind the back, to signal "strike again";
The other on your dress-shirt front to show your heart is @dane,
If black is black or white is white, in black and white it's down,
You're only traitors to the Queen and but rebels to the Crown
If print is print or words are words, the learned Court perpends:
We are not ruled by murderers, only--by their friends.
AN IMPERIAL RESCRIPT
Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,
To ease the strong of their burden, to help the weak in their need,
He sent a word to the peoples, who struggle, and pant, and sweat,
That the straw might be counted fairly and the tally of bricks be set.
The Lords of Their Hands assembled; from the East and the West they drew--
Baltimore, Lille, and Essen, Brummagem, Clyde, and Crewe.
And some were black from the furnace, and some were brown from the soil,
And some were blue from the dye-vat; but all were wearied of toil.
And the young King said:--"I have found it, the road to the rest ye seek:
The strong shall wait for the weary, the hale shall halt for the weak;
With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line,
Ye shall march to peace and plenty in the bond of brotherhood--sign!"
The paper lay on the table, the strong heads bowed thereby,
And a wail went up from the peoples:--"Ay, sign--give rest, for we die!"
A hand was stretched to the goose-quill, a fist was cramped to scrawl,
When--the laugh of a blue-eyed maiden ran clear through the council-hall.
And each one heard Her laughing as each one saw Her plain--
Saidie, Mimi, or Olga, Gretchen, or Mary Jane.
And the Spirit of Man that is in Him to the light of the vision woke;
And the men drew back from the paper, as a Yankee delegate spoke:--
"There's a girl in Jersey City who works on the telephone;
We're going to hitch our horses and dig for a house of our own,
With gas and water connections, and steam-heat through to the top;
And, W. Hohenzollern, I guess I shall work till I drop."
And an English delegate thundered:--"The weak an' the lame be blowed!
I've a berth in the Sou'-West workshops, a home in the Wandsworth Road;
And till the 'sociation has footed my buryin' bill,
I work for the kids an' the missus. Pull up? I be damned if I will!"
And over the German benches the bearded whisper ran:--
"Lager, der girls und der dollars, dey makes or dey breaks a man.
If Schmitt haf collared der dollars, he collars der girl deremit;
But if Schmitt bust in der pizness, we collars der girl from Schmitt."
They passed one resolution:--"Your sub-committee believe
You can lighten the curse of Adam when you've lightened the curse of Eve.
But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen,
We will work for ourself and a woman, for ever and ever, amen."
Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser held--
The day that they razored the Grindstone, the day that the Cat was belled,
The day of the Figs from Thistles, the day of the Twisted Sands,
The day that the laugh of a maiden made light of the Lords of Their Hands.
TOMLINSON
Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair--
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease,
And they came to the Gate within the Wall where Peter holds the keys.
"Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high
The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die--
The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!"
And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone.
"O I have a friend on earth," he said, "that was my priest and guide,
And well would he answer all for me if he were by my side."
--"For that ye strove in neighbour-love it shall be written fair,
But now ye wait at Heaven's Gate and not in Berkeley Square:
Though we called your friend from his bed this night, he could not speak for
you,
For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two."
Then Tomlinson looked up and down, and little gain was there,
For the naked stars grinned overhead, and he saw that his soul was bare:
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,
And Tomlinson took up his tale and spoke of his good in life.
"This I have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me,
And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy."
The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear the path,
And Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness and wrath.
"Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought," he said, "and the tale is yet
to run:
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer--what ha'ye done?"
Then Tomlinson looked back and forth, and little good it bore,
For the Darkness stayed at his shoulder-blade and Heaven's Gate before:--
"O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say,
And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway."
--"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered
Heaven's Gate;
There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate!
O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin
Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within;
Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run,
And. . .the faith that ye share with Berkeley Square uphold you, Tomlinson!"
* * * * *
The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell:
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain,
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again:
They may hold their path, they may leave their path, with never a soul to
mark,
They may burn or freeze, but they must not cease in the Scorn of the Outer
Dark.
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it nipped him to the bone,
And he yearned to the flare of Hell-Gate there as the light of his own hearth-
stone.
The Devil he sat behind the bars, where the desperate legions drew,
But he caught the hasting Tomlinson and would not let him through.
"Wot ye the price of good pit-coal that I must pay?" said he,
"That ye rank yoursel' so fit for Hell and ask no leave of me?
I am all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that ye should give me scorn,
For I strove with God for your First Father the day that he was born.
"Sit down, sit down upon the slag, and answer loud and high
The harm that ye did to the Sons of Men or ever you came to die."
And Tomlinson looked up and up, and saw against the night
The belly of a tortured star blood-red in Hell-Mouth light;
And Tomlinson looked down and down, and saw beneath his feet
The frontlet of a tortured star milk-white in Hell-Mouth heat.
"O I had a love on earth," said he, "that kissed me to my fall,
And if ye would call my love to me I know she would answer all."
--"All that ye did in love forbid it shall be written fair,
But now ye wait at Hell-Mouth Gate and not in Berkeley Square:
Though we whistled your love from her bed tonight, I trow she would not run,
For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!"
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,
And Tomlinson took up the tale and spoke of his sin in life:--
"Once I ha' laughed at the power of Love and twice at the grip of the Grave,
And thrice I ha' patted my God on the head that men might call me brave."
The Devil he blew on a brandered soul and set it aside to cool:--
"Do ye think I would waste my good pit-coal on the hide of a brain-sick fool?
I see no worth in the hobnailed mirth or the jolthead jest ye did
That I should waken my gentlemen that are sleeping three on a grid."
Then Tomlinson looked back and forth, and there was little grace,
For Hell-Gate filled the houseless Soul with the Fear of Naked Space.
"Nay, this I ha' heard," quo' Tomlinson, "and this was noised abroad,
And this I ha' got from a Belgian book on the word of a dead French lord."
--"Ye ha' heard, ye ha' read, ye ha' got, good lack! and the tale begins
afresh--
Have ye sinned one sin for the pride o' the eye or the sinful lust of the
flesh?"
Then Tomlinson he gripped the bars and yammered, "Let me in--
For I mind that I borrowed my neighbour's wife to sin the deadly sin."
The Devil he grinned behind the bars, and banked the fires high:
"Did ye read of that sin in a book?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!"
The Devil he blew upon his nails, and the little devils ran,
And he said: "Go husk this whimpering thief that comes in the guise of a man:
Winnow him out 'twixt star and star, and sieve his proper worth:
There's sore decline in Adam's line if this be spawn of earth."
Empusa's crew, so naked-new they may not face the fire,
But weep that they bin too small to sin to the height of their desire,
Over the coal they chased the Soul, and racked it all abroad,
As children rifle a caddis-case or the raven's foolish hoard.
And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play,
And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away.
"We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind
And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find:
We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone,
And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own."
The Devil he bowed his head on his breast and rumbled deep and low:--
"I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should bid him go.
"Yet close we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place,
My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face;
They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host,
And--I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost."
The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame,
And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his own good name:--
"Now ye could haste my coal to waste, and sit ye down to fry:
Did ye think of that theft for yourself?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!"
The Devil he blew an outward breath, for his heart was free from care:--
"Ye have scarce the soul of a louse," he said, "but the roots of sin are
there,
And for that sin should ye come in were I the lord alone.
But sinful pride has rule inside--and mightier than my own.
"Honour and Wit, fore-damned they sit, to each his priest and whore:
Nay, scarce I dare myself go there, and you they'd torture sore.
"Ye are neither spirit nor spirk," he said; "ye are neither book nor brute--
Go, get ye back to the flesh again for the sake of Man's repute.
"I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should mock your pain,
But look that ye win to worthier sin ere ye come back again.
Get hence, the hearse is at your door--the grim black stallions wait--
They bear your clay to place today. Speed, lest ye come too late!
Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed--go back with an open eye,
And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one--
And. . .the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!"
* * * * * * *
BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS
Dedication
To T. A.
I have made for you a song,
And it may be right or wrong,
But only you can tell me if it's true;
I have tried for to explain
Both your pleasure and your pain,
And, Thomas, here's my best respects to you!
O there'll surely come a day
When they'll give you all your pay,
And treat you as a Christian ought to do;
So, until that day comes round,
Heaven keep you safe and sound,
And, Thomas, here's my best respects to you!
--R. K.
DANNY DEEVER
"What are the bugles blowin' for?" said Files-on-Parade.
"To turn you out, to turn you out", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What makes you look so white, so white?" said Files-on-Parade.
"I'm dreadin' what I've got to watch", the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,
The regiment's in 'ollow square--they're hangin' him today;
They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his stripes away,
An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.
"What makes the rear-rank breathe so 'ard?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's bitter cold, it's bitter cold", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What makes that front-rank man fall down?" said Files-on-Parade.
"A touch o' sun, a touch o' sun", the Colour-Sergeant said.
They are hangin' Danny Deever, they are marchin' of 'im round,
They 'ave 'alted Danny Deever by 'is coffin on the ground;
An' 'e'll swing in 'arf a minute for a sneakin' shootin' hound--
O they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'!
"'Is cot was right-'and cot to mine", said Files-on-Parade.
"'E's sleepin' out an' far tonight", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"I've drunk 'is beer a score o' times", said Files-on-Parade.
"'E's drinkin' bitter beer alone", the Colour-Sergeant said.
They are hangin' Danny Deever, you must mark 'im to 'is place,
For 'e shot a comrade sleepin'--you must look 'im in the face;
Nine 'undred of 'is county an' the regiment's disgrace,
While they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.
"What's that so black agin' the sun?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What's that that whimpers over'ead?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny's soul that's passin' now", the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they're done with Danny Deever, you can 'ear the quickstep play,
The regiment's in column, an' they're marchin' us away;
Ho! the young recruits are shakin', an' they'll want their beer today,
After hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.
TOMMY
I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool--you bet that Tommy sees!
FUZZY-WUZZY
(Soudan Expeditionary Force)
We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.
We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im:
'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces.
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
We gives you your certificate, an' if you want it signed
We'll come an' 'ave a romp with you whenever you're inclined.
We took our chanst among the Khyber 'ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills,
An' a Zulu impi dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We 'eld our bloomin' own, the papers say,
But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us 'oller.
Then 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' the missis and the kid;
Our orders was to break you, an' of course we went an' did.
We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.
'E 'asn't got no papers of 'is own,
'E 'asn't got no medals nor rewards,
So we must certify the skill 'e's shown
In usin' of 'is long two-'anded swords:
When 'e's 'oppin' in an' out among the bush
With 'is coffin-'eaded shield an' shovel-spear,
An 'appy day with Fuzzy on the rush
Will last an 'ealthy Tommy for a year.
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' your friends which are no more,
If we 'adn't lost some messmates we would 'elp you to deplore;
But give an' take's the gospel, an' we'll call the bargain fair,
For if you 'ave lost more than us, you crumpled up the square!
'E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
An', before we know, 'e's 'ackin' at our 'ead;
'E's all 'ot sand an' ginger when alive,
An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead.
'E's a daisy, 'e's a ducky, 'e's a lamb!
'E's a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
'E's the on'y thing that doesn't give a damn
For a Regiment o' British Infantree!
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air--
You big black boundin' beggar--for you broke a British square!
SOLDIER, SOLDIER
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
Why don't you march with my true love?"
"We're fresh from off the ship an' 'e's maybe give the slip,
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
New love! True love!
Best go look for a new love,
The dead they cannot rise, an' you'd better dry your eyes,
An' you'd best go look for a new love.
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
What did you see o' my true love?"
"I seed 'im serve the Queen in a suit o' rifle-green,
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
Did ye see no more o' my true love?"
"I seed 'im runnin' by when the shots begun to fly--
But you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
Did aught take 'arm to my true love?"
"I couldn't see the fight, for the smoke it lay so white--
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
I'll up an' tend to my true love!"
"'E's lying on the dead with a bullet through 'is 'ead,
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
I'll down an' die with my true love!"
"The pit we dug'll 'ide 'im an' the twenty men beside 'im--
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
Do you bring no sign from my true love?"
"I bring a lock of 'air that 'e allus used to wear,
An' you'd best go look for a new love."
"Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
O then I know it's true I've lost my true love!"
"An' I tell you truth again--when you've lost the feel o' pain
You'd best take me for your true love."
True love! New love!
Best take 'im for a new love,
The dead they cannot rise, an' you'd better dry your eyes,
An' you'd best take 'im for your true love.
SCREW-GUNS
Smokin' my pipe on the mountings,
sniffin' the mornin' cool,
I walks in my old brown gaiters
along o' my old brown mule,
With seventy gunners be'ind me,
an' never a beggar forgets
It's only the pick of the Army
that handles the dear little pets--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns--the screw-guns they all love you!
So when we call round with a few guns,
o' course you will know what to do--hoo! hoo!
Jest send in your Chief an' surrender--
it's worse if you fights or you runs:
You can go where you please, you can skid up the trees,
but you don't get away from the guns!
They sends us along where the roads are, but mostly we goes where they ain't:
We'd climb up the side of a sign-board an' trust to the stick o' the paint:
We've chivied the Naga an' Looshai,
we've give the Afreedeeman fits,
For we fancies ourselves at two thousand,
we guns that are built in two bits--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns . . .
If a man doesn't work, why, we drills 'im
an' teaches 'im 'ow to behave;
If a beggar can't march, why, we kills 'im
an' rattles 'im into 'is grave.
You've got to stand up to our business
an' spring without snatchin' or fuss.
D'you say that you sweat with the field-guns?
By God, you must lather with us--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns . . .
The eagles is screamin' around us,
the river's a-moanin' below,
We're clear o' the pine an' the oak-scrub,
we're out on the rocks an' the snow,
An' the wind is as thin as a whip-lash
what carries away to the plains
The rattle an' stamp o' the lead-mules--
the jinglety-jink o' the chains--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns . . .
There's a wheel on the Horns o' the Mornin',
an' a wheel on the edge o' the Pit,
An' a drop into nothin' beneath you as straight as a beggar can spit:
With the sweat runnin' out o' your shirt-sleeves,
an' the sun off the snow in your face,
An' 'arf o' the men on the drag-ropes
to hold the old gun in 'er place--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns . . .
Smokin' my pipe on the mountings,
sniffin' the mornin' cool,
I climbs in my old brown gaiters
along o' my old brown mule.
The monkey can say what our road was--
the wild-goat 'e knows where we passed.
Stand easy, you long-eared old darlin's!
Out drag-ropes! With shrapnel! Hold fast--'Tss! 'Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns--the screw-guns they all love
you!
So when we take tea with a few guns,
o' course you will know what to do--hoo! hoo!
Jest send in your Chief an' surrender--
it's worse if you fights or you runs:
You may hide in the caves, they'll be only your graves,
but you can't get away from the guns!
GUNGA DIN
You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.
He was "Din! Din! Din!
You limpin' lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din!
Hi! slippy hitherao!
Water, get it! Panee lao!1
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din."
The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before,
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind,
For a piece o' twisty rag
An' a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment 'e could find.
When the sweatin' troop-train lay
In a sidin' through the day,
Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl,
We shouted "Harry By!" 2
Till our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve us all.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been?
You put some juldee 3 in it
Or I'll marrow 4 you this minute
If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!"
'E would dot an' carry one
Till the longest day was done;
An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin' nut,
'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear.
With 'is mussick 5 on 'is back,
'E would skip with our attack,
An' watch us till the bugles made "Retire",
An' for all 'is dirty 'ide
'E was white, clear white, inside
When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire!
It was "Din! Din! Din!"
With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green.
When the cartridges ran out,
You could hear the front-files shout,
"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!"
I shan't forgit the night
When I dropped be'ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been.
I was chokin' mad with thirst,
An' the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din.
'E lifted up my 'ead,
An' he plugged me where I bled,
An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water-green:
It was crawlin' and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I've drunk,
I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen;
'E's chawin' up the ground,
An' 'e's kickin' all around:
For Gawd's sake git the water, Gunga Din!"
'E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.
'E put me safe inside,
An' just before 'e died,
"I 'ope you liked your drink", sez Gunga Din.
So I'll meet 'im later on
At the place where 'e is gone--
Where it's always double drill and no canteen;
'E'll be squattin' on the coals
Givin' drink to poor damned souls,
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
1 Bring water swiftly.
2 Mr Atkins' equivalent for "O Brother."
3 Hit you.
4 Be quick.
5 Water skin.
OONTS
(Northern India Transport Train)
Wot makes the soldier's 'eart to @penk, wot makes 'im to perspire?
It isn't standin' up to charge nor lyin' down to fire;
But it's everlastin' waitin' on a everlastin' road
For the commissariat camel an' 'is commissariat load.
O the oont, 1 O the oont, O the commissariat oont!
With 'is silly neck a-bobbin' like a basket full o' snakes;
We packs 'im like an idol, an' you ought to 'ear 'im grunt,
An' when we gets 'im loaded up 'is blessed girth-rope breaks.
Wot makes the rear-guard swear so 'ard when night is drorin' in,
An' every native follower is shiverin' for 'is skin?
It ain't the chanst o' being rushed by Paythans from the 'ills,
It's the commissariat camel puttin' on 'is bloomin' frills!
O the oont, O the oont, O the hairy scary oont!
A-trippin' over tent-ropes when we've got the night alarm!
We socks 'im with a stretcher-pole an' 'eads 'im off in front,
An' when we've saved 'is bloomin' life 'e chaws our bloomin' arm.
The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool,
The elephant's a gentleman, the battery-mule's a mule;
But the commissariat cam-u-el, when all is said an' done,
'E's a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan-child in one.
O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont!
The lumpy-'umpy 'ummin'-bird a-singin' where 'e lies,
'E's blocked the whole division from the rear-guard to the front,
An' when we get him up again--the beggar goes an' dies!
'E'll gall an' chafe an' lame an' fight--'e smells most awful vile;
'E'll lose 'isself for ever if you let 'im stray a mile;
'E's game to graze the 'ole day long an' 'owl the 'ole night through,
An' when 'e comes to greasy ground 'e splits 'isself in two.
O the oont, O the oont, O the floppin', droppin' oont!
When 'is long legs give from under an' 'is meltin' eye is dim,
The tribes is up be'ind us, and the tribes is out in front--
It ain't no jam for Tommy, but it's kites an' crows for 'im.
So when the cruel march is done, an' when the roads is blind,
An' when we sees the camp in front an' 'ears the shots be'ind,
Ho! then we strips 'is saddle off, and all 'is woes is past:
'E thinks on us that used 'im so, and gets revenge at last.
O the oont, O the oont, O the floatin', bloatin' oont!
The late lamented camel in the water-cut 'e lies;
We keeps a mile be'ind 'im an' we keeps a mile in front,
But 'e gets into the drinkin'-casks, and then o' course we dies.
1Camel--oo is pronounced like u in "bull," but by Mr. Atkins to
rhyme with "front."
LOOT
If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg be'ind the keeper's back,
If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,
If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,
You will understand this little song o' mine.
But the service rules are 'ard, an' from such we are debarred,
For the same with English morals does not suit.
(Cornet: Toot! toot!)
W'y, they call a man a robber if 'e stuffs 'is marchin' clobber
With the--
(Chorus) Loo! loo! Lulu! lulu! Loo! loo! Loot! loot! loot!
Ow the loot!
Bloomin' loot!
That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
It's the same with dogs an' men,
If you'd make 'em come again
Clap 'em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot!
(ff) Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot!
If you've knocked a nigger edgeways when 'e's thrustin' for your life,
You must leave 'im very careful where 'e fell;
An' may thank your stars an' gaiters if you didn't feel 'is knife
That you ain't told off to bury 'im as well.
Then the sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under
Why lootin' should be entered as a crime;
So if my song you'll 'ear, I will learn you plain an' clear
'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' overtime.
(Chorus) With the loot, . . .
Now remember when you're 'acking round a gilded Burma god
That 'is eyes is very often precious stones;
An' if you treat a nigger to a dose o' cleanin'-rod
'E's like to show you everything 'e owns.
When 'e won't prodooce no more, pour some water on the floor
Where you 'ear it answer 'ollow to the boot
(Cornet: Toot! toot!)--
When the ground begins to sink, shove your baynick down the chink,
An' you're sure to touch the--
(Chorus) Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot!
Ow the loot! . . .
When from 'ouse to 'ouse you're 'unting, you must always work in pairs--
It 'alves the gain, but safer you will find--
For a single man gets bottled on them twisty-wisty stairs,
An' a woman comes and clobs 'im from be'ind.
When you've turned 'em inside out, an' it seems beyond a doubt
As if there weren't enough to dust a flute
(Cornet: Toot! toot!)--
Before you sling your 'ook, at the 'ousetops take a look,
For it's underneath the tiles they 'ide the loot.
(Chorus) Ow the loot! . . .
You can mostly square a Sergint an' a Quartermaster too,
If you only take the proper way to go;
I could never keep my pickin's, but I've learned you all I knew--
An' don't you never say I told you so.
An' now I'll bid good-bye, for I'm gettin' rather dry,
An' I see another tunin' up to toot
(Cornet: Toot! toot!)--
So 'ere's good-luck to those that wears the Widow's clo'es,
An' the Devil send 'em all they want o' loot!
(Chorus) Yes, the loot,
Bloomin' loot!
In the tunic an' the mess-tin an' the boot!
It's the same with dogs an' men,
If you'd make 'em come again
(fff) Whoop 'em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot!
Heeya! Sick 'im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot!
'SNARLEYOW'
This 'appened in a battle to a batt'ry of the corps
Which is first among the women an' amazin' first in war;
An' what the bloomin' battle was I don't remember now,
But Two's off-lead 'e answered to the name o' Snarleyow.
Down in the Infantry, nobody cares;
Down in the Cavalry, Colonel 'e swears;
But down in the lead with the wheel at the flog
Turns the bold Bombardier to a little whipped dog!
They was movin' into action, they was needed very sore,
To learn a little schoolin' to a native army corps,
They 'ad nipped against an uphill, they was tuckin' down the brow,
When a tricky, trundlin' roundshot give the knock to Snarleyow.
They cut 'im loose an' left 'im--'e was almost tore in two--
But he tried to follow after as a well-trained 'orse should do;
'E went an' fouled the limber, an' the Driver's Brother squeals:
"Pull up, pull up for Snarleyow--'is head's between 'is 'eels!"
The Driver 'umped 'is shoulder, for the wheels was goin' round,
An' there ain't no "Stop, conductor!" when a batt'ry's changin' ground;
Sez 'e: "I broke the beggar in, an' very sad I feels,
But I couldn't pull up, not for you--your 'ead between your 'eels!"
'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the batt'ry an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.
Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
"For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain."
They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best,
So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.
The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt,
But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to "Action Front!"
An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case begun to spread.
The moril of this story, it is plainly to be seen:
You 'avn't got no families when servin' of the Queen--
You 'avn't got no brothers, fathers, sisters, wives, or sons--
If you want to win your battles take an' work your bloomin' guns!
Down in the Infantry, nobody cares;
Down in the Cavalry, Colonel 'e swears;
But down in the lead with the wheel at the flog
Turns the bold Bombardier to a little whipped dog!
THE WIDOW AT WINDSOR
'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
She 'as ships on the foam--she 'as millions at 'ome,
An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
(Ow, poor beggars in red!)
There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses,
There's 'er mark on the medical stores--
An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind
That takes us to various wars.
(Poor beggars!--barbarious wars!)
Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor,
An' 'ere's to the stores an' the guns,
The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces
O' Missis Victorier's sons.
(Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)
Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor,
For 'alf o' Creation she owns:
We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword an' the flame,
An' we've salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!--it's blue with our bones!)
Hands off o' the sons o' the Widow,
Hands off o' the goods in 'er shop,
For the Kings must come down an' the Emperors frown
When the Widow at Windsor says "Stop"!
(Poor beggars!--we're sent to say "Stop"!)
Then 'ere's to the Lodge o' the Widow,
From the Pole to the Tropics it runs--
To the Lodge that we tile with the rank an' the file,
An' open in form with the guns.
(Poor beggars!--it's always they guns!)
We 'ave 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
It's safest to let 'er alone:
For 'er sentries we stand by the sea an' the land
Wherever the bugles are blown.
(Poor beggars!--an' don't we get blown!)
Take 'old o' the Wings o' the Mornin',
An' flop round the earth till you're dead;
But you won't get away from the tune that they play
To the bloomin' old rag over'ead.
(Poor beggars!--it's 'ot over'ead!)
Then 'ere's to the sons o' the Widow,
Wherever, 'owever they roam.
'Ere's all they desire, an' if they require
A speedy return to their 'ome.
(Poor beggars!--they'll never see 'ome!)
BELTS
There was a row in Silver Street that's near to Dublin Quay,
Between an Irish regiment an' English cavalree;
It started at Revelly an' it lasted on till dark:
The first man dropped at Harrison's, the last forninst the Park.
For it was:--"Belts, belts, belts, an' that's one for you!"
An' it was "Belts, belts, belts, an' that's done for you!"
O buckle an' tongue
Was the song that we sung
From Harrison's down to the Park!
There was a row in Silver Street--the regiments was out,
They called us "Delhi Rebels", an' we answered "Threes about!"
That drew them like a hornet's nest--we met them good an' large,
The English at the double an' the Irish at the charge.
Then it was:--"Belts . . .
There was a row in Silver Street--an' I was in it too;
We passed the time o' day, an' then the belts went whirraru!
I misremember what occurred, but subsequint the storm
A Freeman's Journal Supplemint was all my uniform.
O it was:--"Belts . . .
There was a row in Silver Street--they sent the Polis there,
The English were too drunk to know, the Irish didn't care;
But when they grew impertinint we simultaneous rose,
Till half o' them was Liffey mud an' half was tatthered clo'es.
For it was:--"Belts . . .
There was a row in Silver Street--it might ha' raged till now,
But some one drew his side-arm clear, an' nobody knew how;
'Twas Hogan took the point an' dropped; we saw the red blood run:
An' so we all was murderers that started out in fun.
While it was:--"Belts . . .
There was a row in Silver Street--but that put down the shine,
Wid each man whisperin' to his next: "'Twas never work o' mine!"
We went away like beaten dogs, an' down the street we bore him,
The poor dumb corpse that couldn't tell the bhoys were sorry for him.
When it was:--"Belts . . .
There was a row in Silver Street--it isn't over yet,
For half of us are under guard wid punishments to get;
'Tis all a merricle to me as in the Clink I lie:
There was a row in Silver Street--begod, I wonder why!
But it was:--"Belts, belts, belts, an' that's one for you!"
An' it was "Belts, belts, belts, an' that's done for you!"
O buckle an' tongue
Was the song that we sung
From Harrison's down to the Park!
THE YOUNG BRITISH SOLDIER
When the 'arf-made recruity goes out to the East
'E acts like a babe an' 'e drinks like a beast,
An' 'e wonders because 'e is frequent deceased
Ere 'e's fit for to serve as a soldier.
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
Now all you recruities what's drafted today,
You shut up your rag-box an' 'ark to my lay,
An' I'll sing you a soldier as far as I may:
A soldier what's fit for a soldier.
Fit, fit, fit for a soldier . . .
First mind you steer clear o' the grog-sellers' huts,
For they sell you Fixed Bay'nets that rots out your guts--
Ay, drink that 'ud eat the live steel from your butts--
An' it's bad for the young British soldier.
Bad, bad, bad for the soldier . . .
When the cholera comes--as it will past a doubt--
Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout,
For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out,
An' it crumples the young British soldier.
Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier . . .
But the worst o' your foes is the sun over'ead:
You must wear your 'elmet for all that is said:
If 'e finds you uncovered 'e'll knock you down dead,
An' you'll die like a fool of a soldier.
Fool, fool, fool of a soldier . . .
If you're cast for fatigue by a sergeant unkind,
Don't grouse like a woman nor crack on nor blind;
Be handy and civil, and then you will find
That it's beer for the young British soldier.
Beer, beer, beer for the soldier . . .
Now, if you must marry, take care she is old--
A troop-sergeant's widow's the nicest I'm told,
For beauty won't help if your rations is cold,
Nor love ain't enough for a soldier.
'Nough, 'nough, 'nough for a soldier . . .
If the wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loath
To shoot when you catch 'em--you'll swing, on my oath!--
Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er: that's Hell for them both,
An' you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.
Curse, curse, curse of a soldier . . .
When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck,
Don't look nor take 'eed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck
And march to your front like a soldier.
Front, front, front like a soldier . . .
When 'arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,
Don't call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch;
She's human as you are--you treat her as sich,
An' she'll fight for the young British soldier.
Fight, fight, fight for the soldier . . .
When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine,
The guns o' the enemy wheel into line,
Shoot low at the limbers an' don't mind the shine,
For noise never startles the soldier.
Start-, start-, startles the soldier . . .
If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
MANDALAY
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o'mud--
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd--
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow,
She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "Kulla-lo-lo!"
With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin' my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak.
Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
But that's all shove be'ind me--long ago an' fur away,
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay;
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay . . .
I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and--
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be--
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
TROOPIN'
(Our Army in the East)
Troopin', troopin', troopin' to the sea:
'Ere's September come again--the six-year men are free.
O leave the dead be'ind us, for they cannot come away
To where the ship's a-coalin' up that takes us 'ome today.
We're goin' 'ome, we're goin' 'ome,
Our ship is at the shore,
An' you must pack your 'aversack,
For we won't come back no more.
Ho, don't you grieve for me,
My lovely Mary-Ann,
For I'll marry you yit on a fourp'ny bit
As a time-expired man.
The Malabar's in 'arbour with the Jumner at 'er tail,
An' the time-expired's waitin' of 'is orders for to sail.
Ho! the weary waitin' when on Khyber 'ills we lay,
But the time-expired's waitin' of 'is orders 'ome today.
They'll turn us out at Portsmouth wharf in cold an' wet an' rain,
All wearin' Injian cotton kit, but we will not complain;
They'll kill us of pneumonia--for that's their little way--
But damn the chills and fever, men, we're goin' 'ome today!
Troopin', troopin', winter's round again!
See the new draf's pourin' in for the old campaign;
Ho, you poor recruities, but you've got to earn your pay--
What's the last from Lunnon, lads? We're goin' there today.
Troopin', troopin', give another cheer--
'Ere's to English women an' a quart of English beer.
The Colonel an' the regiment an' all who've got to stay,
Gawd's mercy strike 'em gentle--Whoop! we're goin' 'ome today.
We're goin' 'ome, we're goin' 'ome,
Our ship is at the shore,
An' you must pack your 'aversack,
For we won't come back no more.
Ho, don't you grieve for me,
My lovely Mary-Ann,
For I'll marry you yit on a fourp'ny bit
As a time-expired man.
FORD O' KABUL RIVER
Kabul town's by Kabul river--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
There I lef' my mate for ever,
Wet an' drippin' by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
There's the river up and brimmin', an' there's 'arf a squadron swimmin'
'Cross the ford o' Kabul river in the dark.
Kabul town's a blasted place--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
'Strewth I sha'n't forget 'is face
Wet an' drippin' by the ford!
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
Keep the crossing-stakes beside you, an' they will surely guide you
'Cross the ford o' Kabul river in the dark.
Kabul town is sun and dust--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
I'd ha' sooner drownded fust
'Stead of 'im beside the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
You can 'ear the 'orses threshin', you can 'ear the men a-splashin',
'Cross the ford o' Kabul river in the dark.
Kabul town was ours to take--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
I'd ha' left it for 'is sake--
'Im that left me by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
It's none so bloomin' dry there; ain't you never comin' nigh there,
'Cross the ford o' Kabul river in the dark?
Kabul town'll go to hell--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
'Fore I see him 'live an' well--
'Im the best beside the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
Gawd 'elp 'em if they blunder, for their boots'll pull 'em under,
By the ford o' Kabul river in the dark.
Turn your 'orse from Kabul town--
Blow the bugle, draw the sword--
'Im an' 'arf my troop is down,
Down an' drownded by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river,
Ford o' Kabul river in the dark!
There's the river low an' fallin', but it ain't no use o' callin'
'Cross the ford o' Kabul river in the dark.
ROUTE MARCHIN'
We're marchin' on relief over Injia's sunny plains,
A little front o' Christmas-time an' just be'ind the Rains;
Ho! get away you bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed,
There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road;
With its best foot first
And the road a-sliding past,
An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last;
While the Big Drum says,
With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"--
"Kiko kissywarsti don't you hamsher argy jow?" 2
Oh, there's them Injian temples to admire when you see,
There's the peacock round the corner an' the monkey up the tree,
An' there's that rummy silver grass a-wavin' in the wind,
An' the old Grand Trunk a-trailin' like a rifle-sling be'ind.
While it's best foot first, . . .
At half-past five's Revelly, an' our tents they down must come,
Like a lot of button mushrooms when you pick 'em up at 'ome.
But it's over in a minute, an' at six the column starts,
While the women and the kiddies sit an' shiver in the carts.
An' it's best foot first, . . .
Oh, then it's open order, an' we lights our pipes an' sings,
An' we talks about our rations an' a lot of other things,
An' we thinks o' friends in England, an' we wonders what they're at,
An' 'ow they would admire for to hear us sling the bat.1
An' it's best foot first, . . .
It's none so bad o' Sunday, when you're lyin' at your ease,
To watch the kites a-wheelin' round them feather-'eaded trees,
For although there ain't no women, yet there ain't no barrick-yards,
So the orficers goes shootin' an' the men they plays at cards.
Till it's best foot first, . . .
So 'ark an' 'eed, you rookies, which is always grumblin' sore,
There's worser things than marchin' from Umballa to Cawnpore;
An' if your 'eels are blistered an' they feels to 'urt like 'ell,
You drop some tallow in your socks an' that will make 'em well.
For it's best foot first, . . .
We're marchin' on relief over Injia's coral strand,
Eight 'undred fightin' Englishmen, the Colonel, and the Band;
Ho! get away you bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed,
There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road;
With its best foot first
And the road a-sliding past,
An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last;
While the Big Drum says,
With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"--
"Kiko kissywarsti don't you hamsher argy jow?"2
1 Thomas's first and firmest conviction is that he is a profound Orientalist
and a fluent speaker of Hindustani. As a matter of fact, he depends largely
on the sign-language.
2 Why don't you get on
The end
* * * * * *
VOLUME III THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW AND OTHER
GHOST STORIES
THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW
May no ill dreams disturb my rest,
Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.
--Evening Hymn.
ONE of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability.
After five years' service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the
two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or
twelve Regiments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the
non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the
end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the
Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.
Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right, have, even within my
memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you belong
to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are
open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and helpful.
Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He
meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six
weeks disorganized Polder's establishment, stopped Polder's work, and nearly
died in Polder's bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under
eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of
presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the
trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and
the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife's amusements,
will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into
serious trouble.
Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital
on his private account--an arrangement of loose boxes for Incurables, his
friend called it--but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that
had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry,
and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, and the only liberty
allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally
break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.
Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, and his invariable
prescription to all his patients is, "lie low, go slow, and keep cool." He
says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world
justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands
about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively,
and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay's head and a
little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. "Pansay
went off the handle," says Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long leave at
Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-
Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off
his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & 0.
flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly
broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense
about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and
killed him poor devil. Write him off to the System--one man to take the work
of two and a half men."
I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh
was called out to patients, and I happened to be within claim. The man would
make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice, the procession that
was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man's command of
language.
When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from
beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When
little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have
chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.
He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder
Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward he was
reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed
to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to
die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he
died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885:
My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable
that I shall get both ere long--rest that neither the red-coated messenger nor
the midday gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any
homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay
where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doctor's orders, to take all the world
into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my
malady; and shall, too, judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on
this weary earth was ever so tormented as I.
Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn,
my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least
attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months
ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared tell me the
like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. Today, from Peshawur to
the sea, there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who
know this. His explanation is, that my brain, digestion, and eyesight are all
slightly affected; giving rise to my frequent and persistent "delusions."
Delusions, indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still with the same
unwearied smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly trimmed
red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered
invalid. But you shall judge for yourselves.
Three years ago it was my fortune--my great misfortune--to sail from Gravesend
to Bombay, on return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of
an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to know
what manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that, ere the
voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love
with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one
particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and
another who accepts. From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was
conscious that Agnes's passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and--if I may
use the expression--a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognized the
fact then, I do not know. Afterward it was bitterly plain to both of us.
Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to
meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love
took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire
of straw burned itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt
no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington had given up much for my sake,
and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she
learned that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of
the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied
of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly
avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs.
Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly expressed aversion nor
the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least
effect. "Jack, darling!" was her one eternal cuckoo cry: "I'm sure it's all a
mistake--a hideous mistake; and we'll be good friends again some day. Please
forgive me, Jack, dear."
I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into
passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate--the same instinct, I
suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half
killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end.
Next year we met again at Simla--she with her monotonous face and timid
attempts at reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in every fibre of my
frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone; and on each occasion
her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was
all a "mistake"; and still the hope of eventually "making friends." I might
have seen had I cared to look, that that hope only was keeping her alive. She
grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me, at least, that
such conduct would have driven any one to despair. It was uncalled for;
childish; unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again,
sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night-watches, I have begun to think
that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a
"delusion." I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn't;
could I? It would have been unfair to us both.
Last year we met again--on the same terms as before. The same weary appeal,
and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how
wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship.
As the season wore on, we fell apart--that is to say, she found it difficult
to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I
think it over quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884 seems a confused
nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled--my
courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts, and fears; our long
rides together; my trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and now and
again a vision of a white face flitting by in the 'rickshaw with the black and
white liveries I once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs. Wessington's
gloved hand; and, when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome
monotony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering; honestly, heartily loved her,
and with my love for her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty and I were
engaged. The next day I met those accursed "magpie" jhampanies at the back of
Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs.
Wessington everything. She knew it already.
"So I hear you're engaged, Jack dear." Then, without a moment's pause--"I'm
sure it's all a mistake--a hideous mistake. We shall be as good friends some
day, Jack, as we ever were."
My answer might have made even a man wince. It cut the dying woman before me
like the blow of a whip. "Please forgive me, Jack; I didn't mean to make you
angry; but it's true, it's true!"
And Mrs. Wessington broke down completely. I turned away and left her to
finish her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that I had
been an unutterably mean hound. I looked back, and saw that she had turned her
'rickshaw with the idea, I suppose, of overtaking me.
The scene and its surroundings were photographed on my memory.
The rain-swept sky (we were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, dingy
pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy
background against which the black and white liveries of the jhampanies, the
yellow-paneled 'rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington's down-bowed golden head stood
out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning
hack exhausted against the 'rickshaw cushions. I turned my horse up a bypath
near the Sanjowlie Reservoir and literally ran away. Once I fancied I heard a
faint call of "Jack!" This may have been imagination. I never stopped to
verify it. Ten minutes later I came across Kitty on horseback; and, in the
delight of a long ride with her, forgot all about the interview.
A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the inexpressible burden of her
existence was removed from my life. I went Plainsward perfectly happy. Before
three months were over I had forgotten all about her, except that at times the
discovery of some of her old letters reminded me unpleasantly of our bygone
relationship. By January I had disinterred what was left of our correspondence
from among my scattered belongings and had burned it. At the beginning of
April of this year, 1885, I was at Simla--semi-deserted Simla--once more, and
was deep in lover's talks and walks with Kitty. It was decided that we should
be married at the end of June. You will understand, therefore, that, loving
Kitty as I did, I am not saying too much when I pronounce myself to have been,
at that time, the happiest man in India.
Fourteen delightful days passed almost before I noticed their flight.
Then, aroused to the sense of what was proper among mortals circumstanced as
we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement ring was the outward and
visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forthwith
come to Hamilton's to be measured for one. Up to that moment, I give you my
word, we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton's we
accordingly went on the 15th of April, 1885. Remember that--whatever my doctor
may say to the contrary--I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well-
balanced mind and an absolute tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton's
shop together, and there, regardless of the order of affairs, I measured Kitty
for the ring in the presence of the amused assistant. The ring was a sapphire
with two diamonds. We then rode out down the slope that leads to the
Combermere Bridge and Peliti's shop.
While my Waler was cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty
was laughing and chattering at my side--while all Simla, that is to say as
much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading-
room and Peliti's veranda,--I was aware that some one, apparently at a vast
distance, was calling me by my Christian name. It struck me that I had heard
the voice before, but when and where I could not at once determine. In the
short space it took to cover the road between the path from Hamilton's shop
and the first plank of the Combermere Bridge I had thought over half a dozen
people who might have committed such a solecism, and had eventually decided
that it must have been singing in my ears. Immediately opposite Peliti's shop
my eye was arrested by the sight of four jharnpanies in "magpie" livery,
pulling a yellow-paneled, cheap, bazar 'rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew
back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense of irritation and
disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with, without her
black and white servitors reappearing to spoil the day's happiness? Whoever
employed them now I thought I would call upon, and ask as a personal favor to
change her jhampanies' livery. I would hire the men myself, and, if necessary,
buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a
flood of undesirable memories their presence evoked.
"Kitty," I cried, "there are poor Mrs. Wessington's jhampanies turned up
again! I wonder who has them now?"
Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last season, and had always been
interested in the sickly woman.
"What? Where?" she asked. "I can't see them anywhere."
Even as she spoke her horse, swerving from a laden mule, threw himself
directly in front of the advancing 'rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a
word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed through
men and carriage as if they had been thin air.
"What's the matter?" cried Kitty; "what made you call out so foolishly, Jack?
If I am engaged I don't want all creation to know about it. There was lots of
space between the mule and the veranda; and, if you think I can't ride--
"--There!"
Whereupon wilful Kitty set off, her dainty little head in the air, at a hand-
gallop in the direction of the Bandstand; fully expecting, as she herself
afterward told me, that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing
indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk, or that Simla was haunted with devils.
I reined in my impatient cob, and turned round. The 'rickshaw had turned too,
and now stood immediately facing me, near the left railing of the Combermere
Bridge.
"Jack! Jack, darling!" (There was no mistake about the words this time: they
rang through my brain as if they had been shouted in my ear.) "It's some
hideous mistake, I'm sure. Please forgive me, jack, and let's be friends
again."
The 'rickshaw-hood had fallen back, and inside, as I hope and pray daily for
the death I dread by night, sat Mrs. Keith-Wessington, handkerchief in hand,
and golden head bowed on her breast.
How long I stared motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my syce
taking the Waler's bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to
the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half
fainting, into Peliti's for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three
couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the
day. Their trivialities were more comforting to me just then than the
consolations of religion could have been. I plunged into the midst of the
conversation at once; chatted, laughed, and jested with a face (when I caught
a glimpse of it in a mirror) as white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three or
four mem noticed my condition; and, evidently setting it down to the results
of over-many pegs, charitably endeavoured to draw me apart from the rest of
the loungers. But I refused to be led away. I wanted the company of my kind--
as a child rushes into the midst of the dinner-party after a fright in the
dark. I must have talked for about ten minutes or so, though it seemed an
eternity to me, when I heard Kitty's clear voice outside inquiring for me. In
another minute she had entered the shop, prepared to roundly upbraid me for
failing so signally in my duties. Something in my face stopped her.
"Why, Jack," she cried, "what have you been doing? What has happened? Are you
ill?" Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had been a little too
much for me. It was close upon five o'clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and
the sun had been hidden all day. I saw my mistake as soon as the words were
out of my mouth: attempted to recover it; blundered hopelessly and followed
Kitty in a regal rage, out of doors, amid the smiles of my acquaintances. I
made some excuse (I have forgotten what) on the score of my feeling faint; and
cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty to finish the ride by herself.
In my room I sat down and tried calmly to reason out the matter.
Here was I, Theobald Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian in the year
of grace, 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, driven in terror from my
sweetheart's side by the apparition of a woman who had been dead and buried
eight months ago. These were facts that I could not blink. Nothing was further
from my thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty and I left
Hamilton's shop. Nothing was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of wall
opposite Peliti's. It was broad daylight. The road was full of people; and yet
here, look you, in defiance of every law of probability, in direct outrage of
Nature's ordinance, there had appeared to me a face from the grave.
Kitty's Arab had gone through the 'rickshaw: so that my first hope that some
woman marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies
with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this treadmill of
thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as
inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding
it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying
the ghostly occupant of the 'rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the presence of
the 'rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral
illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and
carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!"
Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, imploring her to overlook my
strange conduct of the previous afternoon. My Divinity was still very wroth,
and a personal apology was necessary. I explained, with a fluency born of
night-long pondering over a falsehood, that I had been attacked with sudden
palpitation of the heart--the result of indigestion. This eminently practical
solution had its effect; and Kitty and I rode out that afternoon with the
shadow of my first lie dividing us.
Nothing would please her save a canter round Jakko. With my nerves still
unstrung from the previous night I feebly protested against the notion,
suggesting Observatory Hill, Jutogh, the Boileaugunge road--anything rather
than the Jakko round. Kitty was angry and a little hurt: so I yielded from
fear of provoking further misunderstanding, and we set out together toward
Chota Simla. We walked a greater part of the way, and, according to our
custom, cantered from a mile or so below the Convent to the stretch of level
road by the Sanjowlie Reservoir. The wretched horses appeared to fly, and my
heart beat quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of the ascent. My mind
had been full of Mrs. Wessington all the afternoon; and every inch of the
Jakko road bore witness to our oldtime walks and talks. The bowlders were full
of it; the pines sang it aloud overhead; the rain-fed torrents giggled and
chuckled unseen over the shameful story; and the wind in my ears chanted the
iniquity aloud.
As a fitting climax, in the middle of the level men call the Ladies' Mile the
Horror was awaiting me. No other 'rickshaw was in sight--only the four black
and white jhampanies, the yellow-paneled carriage, and the golden head of the
woman within--all apparently just as I had left them eight months and one
fortnight ago! For an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I saw--we
were so marvelously sympathetic in all things. Her next words undeceived me--
"Not a soul in sight! Come along, Jack, and I'll race you to the Reservoir
buildings!" Her wiry little Arab was off like a bird, my Waler following close
behind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half a minute brought us
within fifty yards of the 'rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a little.
The 'rickshaw was directly in the middle of the road; and once more the Arab
passed through it, my horse following. "Jack! Jack dear! Please forgive me,"
rang with a wail in my ears, and, after an interval:--"It's a mistake, a
hideous mistake!"
I spurred my horse like a man possessed. When I turned my head at the
Reservoir works, the black and white liveries were still waiting--patiently
waiting--under the grey hillside, and the wind brought me a mocking echo of
the words I had just heard. Kitty bantered me a good deal on my silence
throughout the remainder of the ride. I had been talking up till then wildly
and at random.
To save my life I could not speak afterward naturally, and from Sanjowlie to
the Church wisely held my tongue.
I was to dine with the Mannerings that night, and had barely time to canter
home to dress. On the road to Elysium Hill I overheard two men talking
together in the dusk.--"It's a curious thing," said one, "how completely all
trace of it disappeared. You know my wife was insanely fond of the woman
('never could see anything in her myself), and wanted me to pick up her old
'rickshaw and coolies if they were to be got for love or money. Morbid sort of
fancy I call it; but I've got to do what the Memsahib tells me.
"Would you believe that the man she hired it from tells me that all four of
the men--they were brothers--died of cholera on the way to Hardwar, poor
devils, and the 'rickshaw has been broken up by the man himself. 'Told me he
never used a dead Memsahib's 'rickshaw. 'Spoiled his luck.' Queer notion,
wasn't it? Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling any one's luck except
her own!" I laughed aloud at this point; and my laugh jarred on me as I
uttered it. So there were ghosts of 'rickshaws after all, and ghostly
employments in the other world! How much did Mrs. Wessington give her men?
What were their hours? Where did they go?
And for visible answer to my last question I saw the infernal Thing blocking
my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast, and by short cuts unknown to
ordinary coolies. I laughed aloud a second time and checked my laughter
suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. Mad to a certain extent I must
have been, for I recollect that I reined in my horse at the head of the
'rickshaw, and politely wished Mrs. Wessington "Good evening." Her answer was
one I knew only too well. I listened to the end; and replied that I had heard
it all before, but should be delighted if she had anything further to say.
Some malignant devil stronger than I must have entered into me that evening,
for I have a dim recollection of talking the commonplaces of the day for five
minutes to the Thing in front of me.
"Mad as a hatter, poor devil--or drunk. Max, try and get him to come home."
Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington's voice! The two men had overheard me
speaking to the empty air, and had returned to look after me. They were very
kind and considerate, and from their words evidently gathered that I was
extremely drunk. I thanked them confusedly and cantered away to my hotel,
there changed, and arrived at the Mannerings' ten minutes late. I pleaded the
darkness of the night as an excuse; was rebuked by Kitty for my unlover-like
tardiness; and sat down.
The conversation had already become general; and under cover of it, I was
addressing some tender small talk to my sweetheart when I was aware that at
the further end of the table a short red-whiskered man was describing, with
much broidery, his encounter with a mad unknown that evening.
A few sentences convinced me that he was repeating the incident of half an
hour ago. In the middle of the story he looked round for applause, as
professional story-tellers do, caught my eye, and straightway collapsed. There
was a moment's awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man muttered something
to the effect that he had "forgotten the rest," thereby sacrificing a
reputation as a good story~teller which he had built up for six seasons past.
I blessed him from the bottom of my heart, and--went on with my fish.
In the fulness of time that dinner came to an end; and with genuine regret I
tore myself away from Kitty--as certain as I was of my own existence that It
would be waiting for me outside the door. The red-whiskered man, who had been
introduced to me as Doctor Heatherlegh, of Simla, volunteered to bear me
company as far as our roads lay together. I accepted his offer with gratitude.
My instinct had not deceived me. It lay in readiness in the Mall, and, in what
seemed devilish mockery of our ways, with a lighted head-lamp. The red-
whiskered man went to the point at once, in a manner that showed he bad been
thinking over it all dinner time.
"I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the matter with you this evening on the
Elysium road?" The suddenness of the question wrenched an answer from me
before I was aware.
"That!" said I, pointing to It.
"That may be either D. T. or Eyes for aught I know. Now you don't liquor. I
saw as much at dinner, so it can't be D. T. There's nothing whatever where
you're pointing, though you're sweating and trembling with fright like a
scared pony. Therefore, I conclude that it's Eyes. And I ought to understand
all about them. Come along home with me. I'm on the Blessington lower road."
To my intense delight the 'rickshaw instead of waiting for us kept about
twenty yards ahead--and this, too whether we walked, trotted, or cantered. In
the course of that long night ride I had told my companion almost as much as I
have told you here.
"Well, you've spoiled one of the best tales I've ever laid tongue to," said
he, "but I'll forgive you for the sake of what you've gone through. Now come
home and do what I tell you; and when I've cured you, young man, let this be a
lesson to you to steer clear of women and indigestible food till the day of
your death."
The 'rickshaw kept steady in front; and my red-whiskered friend seemed to
derive great pleasure from my account of its exact whereabouts.
"Eyes, Pansay--all Eyes, Brain, and Stomach. And the greatest of these three
is Stomach. You've too much conceited Brain, too little Stomach, and
thoroughly unhealthy Eyes. Get your Stomach straight and the rest follows. And
all that's French for a liver pill.
"I'll take sole medical charge of you from this hour! for you're too
interesting a phenomenon to be passed over."
By this time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington lower road and the
'rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, over-hanging shale cliff.
Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out an oath.
"Now, if you think I'm going to spend a cold night on the hillside for the
sake of a stomach-cum-Brain-cum-Eye illusion--Lord, ha' mercy! What's that?"
There was a muffled report, a blinding smother of dust just in front of us, a
crack, the noise of rent boughs, and about ten yards of the cliff-side--pines,
undergrowth, and all--slid down into the road below, completely blocking it
up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in
the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash.
Our two horses stood motionless and sweating with fear. As soon as the rattle
of falling earth and stone had subsided, my companion muttered:--"Man, if we'd
gone forward we should have been ten feet deep in our graves by now. 'There
are more things in heaven and earth...' Come home, Pansay, and thank God. I
want a peg badly."
We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh's
house shortly after midnight.
His attempts toward my cure commenced almost immediately, and for a week I
never left his sight. Many a time in the course of that week did I bless the
good fortune which had thrown me in contact with Simla's best and kindest
doctor. Day by day my spirits grew lighter and more equable. Day by day, too,
I became more and more inclined to fall in with Heatherlegh's "spectral
illusion" theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to Kitty,
telling her that a slight sprain caused by a fall from my horse kept me
indoors for a few days; and that I should be recovered before she had time to
regret my absence.
Heatherlegh's treatment was simple to a degree. It consisted of liver pills,
cold-water baths, and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn--
for, as he sagely observed:--"A man with a sprained ankle doesn't walk a dozen
miles a day, and your young woman might be wondering if she saw you."
At the end of the week, after much examination of pupil and pulse, and strict
injunction' as to diet and pedestrianism, Heatherlegh dismissed me as
brusquely as he had taken charge of me. Here is his parting benediction:--
"Man, I can certify to your mental cure, and that's as much as to say I've
cured most of your bodily ailments. Now, get your traps out of this as soon as
you can; and be off to make love to Miss Kitty."
I was endeavoring to express my thanks for his kindness. He cut me short.
"Don't think I did this because I like you. I gather that you've behaved like
a blackguard all through. But, all the same, you re a phenomenon, and as queer
a phenomenon as you are a blackguard. No!"--checking me a second time--"not a
rupee please. Go out and see if you can find the eyes-brain-and-stomach
business again. I'll give you a lakh for each time you see it."
Half an hour later I was in the Mannerings' drawing-room with Kitty--drunk
with the intoxication of present happiness and the fore-knowledge that I
should never more be troubled with Its hideous presence. Strong in the sense
of my new-found security, I proposed a ride at once; and, by preference, a
canter round Jakko.
Never had I felt so well, so overladen with vitality and mere animal spirits,
as I did on the afternoon of the 30th of April. Kitty was delighted at the
change in my appearance, and complimented me on it in her delightfully frank
and outspoken manner. We left the Mannerings' house together, laughing and
talking, and cantered along the Chota Simla road as of old.
I was in haste to reach the Sanjowlie Reservoir and there make my assurance
doubly sure. The horses did their best, but seemed all too slow to my
impatient mind. Kitty was astonished at my boisterousness. "Why, Jack!" she
cried at last, "you are behaving like a child. What are you doing?"
We were just below the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my
Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of my
riding-whip.
"Doing?" I answered; "nothing, dear. That's just it. If you'd been doing
nothing for a week except lie up, you'd be as riotous as I."
"'Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth, Joying to feel yourself alive;
Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible Earth, Lord of the senses five.'"
My quotation was hardly out of my lips before we had rounded the corner above
the Convent; and a few yards further on could see across to Sanjowlie. In the
centre of the level road stood the black and white liveries, the yellow-
paneled 'rickshaw, and Mrs. Keith-Wessington. I pulled up, looked, rubbed my
eyes, and, I believe must have said something. The next thing I knew was that
I was lying face downward on the road with Kitty kneeling above me in tears.
"Has it gone, child ?" I gasped. Kitty only wept more bitterly.
"Has what gone, Jack dear? what does it all mean? There must be a mistake
somewhere, Jack. A hideous mistake." Her last words brought me to my feet--
mad--raving for the time being.
"Yes, there is a mistake somewhere," I repeated, "a hideous mistake. Come and
look at It."
I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty by the wrist along the road up
to where It stood, and implored her for pity's sake to speak to It; to tell It
that we were betrothed; that neither Death nor Hell could break the tie
between us; and Kitty only knows how much more to the same effect. Now and
again I appealed passionately to the Terror in the 'rickshaw to bear witness
to all I had said, and to release me from a torture that was killing me. As I
talked I suppose I must have told Kitty of my old relations with Mrs.
Wessington, for I saw her listen intently with white face and blazing eyes.
"Thank you, Mr. Pansay," she said, "that's quite enough. Syce ghora lao."
The syces, impassive as Orientals always are, had come up with the recaptured
horses; and as Kitty sprang into her saddle I caught hold of the bridle,
entreating her to hear me out and forgive. My answer was the cut of her
riding-whip across my face from mouth to eye, and a word or two of farewell
that even now I cannot write down. So I judged, and judged rightly, that Kitty
knew all; and I staggered back to the side of the 'rickshaw. My face was cut
and bleeding, and the blow of the riding-whip had raised a livid blue wheal on
it. I had no self-respect. Just then, Heatherlegh, who must have been
following Kitty and me at a distance, cantered up.
"Doctor," I said, pointing to my face, "here's Miss Mannering's signature to
my order of dismissal and--I'll thank you for that lakh as soon as
convenient."
Heatherlegh's face, even in my abject misery, moved me to laughter.
"I'll stake my professional reputation"--he began.
"Don't be a fool," I whispered. "I've lost my life's happiness and you'd
better take me home."
As I spoke the 'rickshaw was gone. Then I lost all knowledge of what was
passing. The crest of Jakko seemed to heave and roll like the crest of a cloud
and fall in upon me.
Seven days later (on the 7th of May, that is to say) I was aware that I was
lying in Heatherlegh's room as weak as a little child. Heatherlegh was
watching me intently from behind the papers on his writing-table. His first
words were not encouraging; but I was too far spent to be much moved by them.
"Here's Miss Kitty has sent back your letters. You corresponded a good deal,
you young people. Here's a packet that looks like a ring, and a cheerful sort
of a note from Mannering Papa, which I've taken the liberty of reading and
burning. The old gentleman's not pleased with you."
"And Kitty?" I asked, dully.
"Rather more drawn than her father from what she says. By the same token you
must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met
you. 'Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs.
Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She's a hot-
headed little virago, your mash. 'Will have it too that you were suffering
from D. T. when that row on the Jakko road turned up. 'Says she'll die before
she ever speaks to you again."
I groaned and turned over to the other side.
"Now you've got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off;
and the Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D.
T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd
prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All
Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five
minutes to think over it."
During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the lowest
circles of the Inferno which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And at the
same time I myself was watching myself faltering through the dark labyrinths
of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair
might have wondered, which dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I
heard myself answering in a voice that I hardly recognized, "--They're
confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give 'em fits,
Heatherlegh, and my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer."
Then my two selves joined, and it was only I (half crazed, devil-driven I)
that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month.
"But I am in Simla," I kept repeating to myself. "I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla
and there are no ghosts here. It's unreasonable of that woman to pretend there
are. Why couldn't Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might
just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I'd never have come hack on purpose
to kill her. Why can't I be left alone--left alone and happy?"
It was high noon when I first awoke, and the sun was low in the sky before I
slept--slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel
further pain.
Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he
had received an answer from Mr. Mannering, and that, thanks to his
(Heatherlegh's) friendly offices, the story of my affliction had traveled
through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied.
"And that's rather more than you deserve," he concluded, pleasantly, "though
the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind;
we'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon."
I declined firmly to be cured. "You've been much too good to me already, old
man," said I; "but I don't think I need trouble you further."
In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the burden
that had been laid upon me.
With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against
the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I
whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world; and I felt
that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out
for so hideous a fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it
seemed that the 'rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows;
that Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men and
women I knew were all ghosts; and the great, grey hills themselves but vain
shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backward and forward
for seven weary days; my body growing daily stronger and stronger, until the
bedroom looking-glass told me that I had returned to everyday life, and was as
other men once more. Curiously enough my face showed no signs of the struggle
I had gone through. It was pale indeed, but as expressionless and commonplace
as ever. I had expected some permanent alteration--visible evidence of the
disease that was eating me away. I found nothing.
On the 15th of May, I left Heatherlegh's house at eleven o'clock in the
morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I found
that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in clumsy
fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. Nevertheless I recognized that for the
rest of my natural life I should be among but not of my fellows; and I envied
very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the
Club, and at four o'clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope
of meeting Kitty. Close to the Band-stand the black and white liveries joined
me; and I heard Mrs. Wessington's old appeal at my side. I had been expecting
this ever since I came out; and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom
'rickshaw and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close
to the bazar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any
sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay me the
compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had served for
an excuse.
So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o'-Love, crept round
Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines dripped like
roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain. Two
or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud:"I'm Jack Pansay
on leave at Simla--at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn't forget that--
I mustn't forget that." Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had
heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So's horses--anything, in fact, that
related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the
multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not
taking leave of my senses. It gave me much comfort; and must have prevented my
hearing Mrs. Wessington for a time.
Once more I wearily climbed the Convent slope and entered the level road. Here
Kitty and the man started off at a canter, and I was left alone with Mrs.
Wessington. "Agnes," said I, "will you put back your hood and tell me what it
all means?" The hood dropped noiselessly, and I was face to face with my dead
and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her
alive; carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same
cardcase in her left. (A woman eight months dead with a cardcase!) I had to
pin myself down to the multiplication-table, and to set both hands on the
stone parapet of the road, to assure myself that that at least was real.
"Agnes," I repeated, "for pity's sake tell me what it all means." Mrs.
Wessington leaned forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used to
know so well, and spoke.
If my story had not already so madly overleaped the hounds of all human belief
I should apologize to you now. As I know that no one--no, not even Kitty, for
whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct--will believe
me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the
Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief's house as I might
walk by the side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep in conversation. The
second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon
me, and like the Prince in Tennyson's poem, "I seemed to move amid a world of
ghosts." There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two
joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that
they were the shadows--impalpable, fantastic shadows--that divided for Mrs.
Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that
weird interview I cannot--indeed, I dare not--tell. Heatherlegh's comment
would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain-
eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a
marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in
this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect and
cruelty?
I met Kitty on the homeward road--a shadow among shadows.
If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their order,
my story would never come to an end; and your patience would he exhausted.
Morning after morning and evening after evening the ghostly 'rickshaw and I
used to wander through Simla together. Wherever I went there the four black
and white liveries followed me and bore me company to and from my hotel. At
the Theatre I found them amid the crowd of yelling jhampanies; outside the
Club veranda, after a long evening of whist; at the Birthday Ball, waiting
patiently for my reappearance; and in broad daylight when I went calling. Save
that it cast no shadow, the 'rickshaw was in every respect as real to look
upon as one of wood and iron. More than once, indeed, I have had to check
myself from warning some hard-riding friend against cantering over it. More
than once I have walked down the Mall deep in conversation with Mrs.
Wessington to the unspeakable amazement of the passers-by.
Before I had been out and about a week I learned that the "fit" theory had
been discarded in favor of insanity. However, I made no change in my mode of
life. I called, rode, and dined out as freely as ever. I had a passion for the
society of my kind which I had never felt before; I hungered to be among the
realities of life; and at the same time I felt vaguely unhappy when I had been
separated too long from my ghostly companion. It would be almost impossible to
describe my varying moods from the 15th of May up to today.
The presence of the 'rickshaw filled me by turns with horror, blind fear, a
dim sort of pleasure, and utter despair. I dared not leave Simla; and I knew
that my stay there was killing me. I knew, moreover, that it was my destiny to
die slowly and a little every day. My only anxiety was to get the penance over
as quietly as might be. Alternately I hungered for a sight of Kitty and
watched her outrageous flirtations with my successor--to speak more
accurately, my successors--with amused interest. She was as much out of my
life as I was out of hers. By day I wandered with Mrs. Wessington almost
content. By night I implored Heaven to let me return to the world as I used to
know it. Above all these varying moods lay the sensation of dull, numbing
wonder that the Seen and the Unseen should mingle so strangely on this earth
to hound one poor soul to its grave.
* * * * * * * * *
August 27.--Heatherlegh has been indefatigable in his attendance on me; and
only yesterday told me that I ought to send in an application for sick leave.
An application to escape the company of a phantom! A request that the
Government would graciously permit me to get rid of five ghosts and an airy
'rickshaw by going to England. Heatherlegh's proposition moved me to almost
hysterical laughter. I told him that I should await the end quietly at Simla;
and I am sure that the end is not far off. Believe me that I dread its advent
more than any word can say; and I torture myself nightly with a thousand
speculations as to the manner of my death.
Shall I die in my bed decently and as an English gentleman should die; or, in
one last walk on the Mall, will my soul be wrenched from me to take its place
forever and ever by the side of that ghastly phantasm? Shall I return to my
old lost allegiance in the next world, or shall I meet Agnes loathing her and
bound to her side through all eternity? Shall we two hover over the scene of
our lives till the end of Time? As the day of my death draws nearer, the
intense horror that all living flesh feels toward escaped spirits from beyond
the grave grows more and more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick
among the dead with scarcely one-half of your life completed. It is a thousand
times more awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what
unimaginable terror. Pity me, at least on the score of my "delusion," for I
know you will never believe what I have written here Yet as surely as ever a
man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.
In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I
killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon
me.
* * * * * * *
MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY
As I came through the Desert thus it was--As I came through the Desert.
--The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and
shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in
building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real
insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon
treating his ghosts--he has published half a workshopful of them--with levity.
He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt
outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a
Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost,
and particularly an Indian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses,
and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop
upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have
died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the
crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death
in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men
may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown
into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under
the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried.
These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not
attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have
frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of
both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla,
not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dak-bungalow on the Old
Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is
supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one
of her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible
horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has
been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers'
Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is
guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of
Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that
none will willingly rent; and there is something--not fever--wrong with a big
bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses,
and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.
Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries
in their compound--witnesses to the "changes and chances of this mortal life"
in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are
objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty,
while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters
senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless.
If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these
thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a
khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and
trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.
In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found,
they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dak-
bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew
to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick
walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room,
and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in "converted"
ones--old houses officiating as dak-bungalows--where nothing was in its proper
place and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces
where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as
through a broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where the last entry in the
visitors' book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-
kid's head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from
sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to
drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still
greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair
proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dak-
bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily
hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died
mad in dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up
till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's method of handling them, as
shown in "The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories." I am now in the
Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bungalow. But THAT was the smallest part
of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dak-
bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak-bungalow was old and rotten and
unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the
windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used by
native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real
Sahibs were rare. The khansamah, who was nearly bent double with old age, said
so.
When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land,
accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling
of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The khansamah completely lost
his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He
gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a
quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in
his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a
double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did not go through
the pretense of calling it "khana"--man's victuals. He said "ratub," and that
means, among other things, "grub"--dog's rations. There was no insult in his
choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.
While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down,
after exploring the dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which
was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors
fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the
partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness.
Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and
every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I
shut the door. There were no lamps--only candles in long glass shades. An oil
wick was set in the bathroom.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst of the many
that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not
open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind
splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled
and roared.
Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar
off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of
the Dead--the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratub--a curious meal, half
native and half English in composition--with the old khansamah babbling behind
my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles
playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the
sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past
sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bath-room
threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to
talk nonsense.
Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the regular--
"Let--us--take--and--heave--him--over" grunt of doolie-bearers in the
compound. First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third. I heard
the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook.
"That's some one trying to come in," I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded
myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was
attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. "That's some Sub-Deputy
Assistant," I said, "and he has brought his friends with him. Now they'll talk
and spit and smoke for an hour."
But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into
the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left
in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of
bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as
I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man
in his senses can possibly mistake--the whir of a billiard ball down the
length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound
is like it. A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I
was not frightened--indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had
become of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.
Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a
mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can
feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting
up.
There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one
thing--a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself;
and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and
two chairs--all the furniture of the room next to mine--could so exactly
duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three--
cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and
would have given worlds to have escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened,
and with each listen the game grew clearer.
There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double click
and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing
billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a
billiard table!
Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward--stroke after
stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was
a failure.
Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but
abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see--fear that dries the
inside of the mouth and half of the throat--fear that makes you sweat on the
palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a
fine Fear--a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very
improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow proved the reality of the thing.
No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the
spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."
A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage--it breeds infinite
credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow- haunter:--"There is a
corpse in the next room, and there's a mad girl in the next but one, and the
woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,"
the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too
wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.
This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from
his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as
I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the
bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long
game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My
dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear;
because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such
superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.
After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept
because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept
awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered
into the dark of the next room.
When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and
inquired for the means of departure.
"By the way, khansamah," I said, "what were those three doolies doing in my
compound in the night?"
"There were no doolies," said the khansamah.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I
was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the
owner of the big Black Pool down below.
"Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?" I asked.
"No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long,
it was a billiard room."
"A how much?"
"A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was khansamah then in
the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across
with brandy-shrab. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table
on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and
the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul."
"Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?"
"It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and always angry,
was playing here one night, and he said to me:--'Mangal Khan, brandy-pani do,'
and I filled the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, and his head
fell lower and lower till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off, and
when we--the Sahibs and I myself--ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to
carry him out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal
Khan, am still living, by your favor."
That was more than enough! I had my ghost--a firsthand, authenticated article.
I would write to the Society for Psychical Research--I would paralyze the
Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed
crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society
might send their regular agent to investigate later on.
I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of
the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,--with a miss in balk this
time, for the whir was a short one.
The door was open and I could see into the room. Click--c1ick! That was a
cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a
fresh breeze without. The unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate. And
well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the
dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks
off the window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!
Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to mistake the
whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I shut my
enlightened eyes the sound was marvelously like that of a fast game.
Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.
"This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the Presence was disturbed
and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last
night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest
in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah?
They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have
been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a
dirty man!"
Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in
advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big green
umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions
of morality.
There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head,
wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the course
of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib's tragic death in three separate
stations--two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and
there the Sahib died while driving a dogcart.
If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal
with his corpse.
I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the
wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong "hundred
and fifty up." Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt
that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.
Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.
That was the bitterest thought of all!
THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES
Alive or dead-there is no other way.
--Native Proverb.
THERE is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale. Jukes by
accident stumbled upon a village that is well known to exist, though he is the
only Englishman who has been there. A somewhat similar institution used to
flourish on the outskirts of Calcutta, and there is a story that if you go
into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart of the Great Indian Desert,
you shall come across not a village but a town where the Dead who did not die
but may not live have established their headquarters. And, since it is
perfectly true that in the same Desert is a wonderful city where all the rich
money lenders retreat after they have made their fortunes (fortunes so vast
that the owners cannot trust even the strong hand of the Government to protect
them, but take refuge in the waterless sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring
barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces with gold and
ivory and Minton tiles and mother-of-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's tale
should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans and
distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take the trouble
to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his legitimate work. He
never varies the tale in the telling, and grows very hot and indignant when he
thinks of the disrespectful treatment he received. He wrote this quite
straightforwardly at first, but he has since touched it up in places and
introduced Moral Reflections, thus:
In the beginning it all arose from a slight attack of fever. My work
necessitated my being in camp for some months between Pakpattan and
Muharakpur--a desolate sandy stretch of country as every one who has had the
misfortune to go there may know. My coolies were neither more nor less
exasperating than other gangs, and my work demanded sufficient attention to
keep me from moping, had I been inclined to so unmanly a weakness.
On the 23d December, 1884, I felt a little feverish. There was a full moon at
the time, and, in consequence, every dog near my tent was baying it. The
brutes assembled in twos and threes and drove me frantic. A few days
previously I had shot one loud-mouthed singer and suspended his carcass in
terrorem about fifty yards from my tent-door. But his friends fell upon,
fought for, and ultimately devoured the body; and, as it seemed to me, sang
their hymns of thanksgiving afterward with renewed energy.
The light-heartedness which accompanies fever acts differently on different
men. My irritation gave way, after a short time, to a fixed determination to
slaughter one huge black and white beast who had been foremost in song and
first in flight throughout the evening. Thanks to a shaking hand and a giddy
head I had already missed him twice with both barrels of my shot-gun, when it
struck me that my best plan would be to ride him down in the open and finish
him off with a hog-spear. This, of course, was merely the semi-delirious
notion of a fever patient; but I remember that it struck me at the time as
being eminently practical and feasible.
I therefore ordered my groom to saddle Pornic and bring him round quietly to
the rear of my tent. When the pony was ready, I stood at his head prepared to
mount and dash out as soon as the dog should again lift up his voice. Pornic,
by the way, had not been out of his pickets for a couple of days; the night
air was crisp and chilly; and I was armed with a specially long and sharp pair
of persuaders with which I had been rousing a sluggish cob that afternoon. You
will easily believe, then, that when he was let go he went quickly. In one
moment, for the brute bolted as straight as a die, the tent was left far
behind, and we were flying over the smooth sandy soil at racing speed.
In another we had passed the wretched dog, and I had almost forgotten why it
was that I had taken the horse and hogspear.
The delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid motion through the air must
have taken away the remnant of my senses. I have a faint recollection of
standing upright in my stirrups, and of brandishing my hog-spear at the great
white Moon that looked down so calmly on my mad gallop; and of shouting
challenges to the camel-thorn bushes as they whizzed past. Once or twice I
believe, I swayed forward on Pornic's neck, and literally hung on by my spurs-
-as the marks next morning showed.
The wretched beast went forward like a thing possessed, over what seemed to be
a limitless expanse of moonlit sand. Next, I remember, the ground rose
suddenly in front of us, and as we topped the ascent I saw the waters of the
Sutlej shining like a silver bar below. Then Pornic blundered heavily on his
nose, and we rolled together down some unseen slope.
I must have lost consciousness, for when I recovered I was lying on my stomach
in a heap of soft white sand, and the dawn was beginning to break dimly over
the edge of the slope down which I had fallen. As the light grew stronger I
saw that I was at the bottom of a horse-shoe shaped crater of sand, opening on
one side directly on to the shoals of the Sutlej. My fever had altogether left
me, and, with the exception of a slight dizziness in the head, I felt no had
effects from the fall over night.
Pornic, who was standing a few yards away, was naturally a good deal
exhausted, but had not hurt himself in the least. His saddle, a favorite polo
one, was much knocked about, and had been twisted under his belly. It took me
some time to put him to rights, and in the meantime I had ample opportunities
of observing the spot into which I had so foolishly dropped.
At the risk of being considered tedious, I must describe it at length:
inasmuch as an accurate mental picture of its peculiarities will be of
material assistance in enabling the reader to understand what follows.
Imagine then, as I have said before, a horseshoe-shaped crater of sand with
steeply graded sand walls about thirty-five feet high. (The slope, I fancy,
must have been about 65 degrees.) This crater enclosed a level piece of ground
about fifty yards long by thirty at its broadest part, with a crude well in
the centre. Round the bottom of the crater, about three feet from the level of
the ground proper, ran a series of eighty-three semi-circular ovoid, square,
and multilateral holes, all about three feet at the mouth. Each hole on
inspection showed that it was carefully shored internally with drift-wood and
bamboos, and over the mouth a wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of a
jockey's cap, for two feet. No sign of life was visible in these tunnels, but
a most sickening stench pervaded the entire amphitheatre--a stench fouler than
any which my wanderings in Indian villages have introduced me to.
Having remounted Pornic, who was as anxious as I to get back to camp, I rode
round the base of the horseshoe to find some place whence an exit would be
practicable. The inhabitants, whoever they might be, had not thought fit to
put in an appearance, so I was left to my own devices. My first attempt to
"rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap
exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At
each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the
drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A couple of ineffectual charges sent
us both rolling down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents of sand; and
I was constrained to turn my attention to the river-bank.
Here everything seemed easy enough. The sand hills ran down to the river edge,
it is true, but there were plenty of shoals and shallows across which I could
gallop Pornic, and find my way back to terra firma by turning sharply to the
right or left. As I led Pornic over the sands I was startled by the faint pop
of a rifle across the river; and at the same moment a bullet dropped with a
sharp "whit" close to Pornic's head.
There was no mistaking the nature of the missile-a regulation Martini-Henry
"picket." About five hundred yards away a country-boat was anchored in
midstream; and a jet of smoke drifting away from its bows in the still morning
air showed me whence the delicate attention had come. Was ever a respectable
gentleman in such an impasse? The treacherous sand slope allowed no escape
from a spot which I had visited most involuntarily, and a promenade on the
river frontage was the signal for a bombardment from some insane native in a
boat. I'm afraid that I lost my temper very much indeed.
Another bullet reminded me that I had better save my breath to cool my
porridge; and I retreated hastily up the sands and back to the horseshoe,
where I saw that the noise of the rifle had drawn sixty-five human beings from
the badger-holes which I had up till that point supposed to be untenanted. I
found myself in the midst of a crowd of spectators--about forty men, twenty
women, and one child who could not have been more than five years old. They
were all scantily clothed in that salmon-colored cloth which one associates
with Hindu mendicants, and, at first sight, gave me the impression of a band
of loathsome fakirs. The filth and repulsiveness of the assembly were beyond
all description, and I shuddered to think what their life in the badger-holes
must be.
Even in these days, when local self government has destroyed the greater part
of a native's respect for a Sahib, I have been accustomed to a certain amount
of civility from my inferiors, and on approaching the crowd naturally expected
that there would be some recognition of my presence. As a matter of fact there
was; but it was by no means what I had looked for.
The ragged crew actually laughed at me--such laughter I hope I may never hear
again. They cackled, yelled, whistled, and howled as I walked into their
midst; some of them literally throwing themselves down on the ground in
convulsions of unholy mirth. In a moment I had let go Pornic's head, and.
irritated beyond expression at the morning's adventure, commenced cuffing
those nearest to me with all the force I could. The wretches dropped under my
blows like nine-pins, and the laughter gave place to wails for mercy; while
those yet untouched clasped me round the knees, imploring me in all sorts of
uncouth tongues to spare them.
In the tumult, and just when I was feeling very much ashamed of myself for
having thus easily given way to my temper, a thin, high voice murmured in
English from behind my shoulder: "--Sahib! Sahib! Do you not know me? Sahib,
it is Gunga Dass, the telegraph-master."
I spun round quickly and faced the speaker.
Gunga Dass, (I have, of course, no hesitation in mentioning the man's real
name) I had known four years before as a Deccanee Brahmin loaned by the Punjab
Government to one of the Khalsia States. He was in charge of a branch
telegraph-office there, and when I had last met him was a jovial, full-
stomached, portly Government servant with a marvelous capacity for making had
puns in English--a peculiarity which made me remember him long after I had
forgotten his services to me in his official capacity. It is seldom that a
Hindu makes English puns.
Now, however, the man was changed beyond all recognition. Caste-mark, stomach,
slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone. I looked at a
withered skeleton, turban-less and almost naked, with long matted hair and
deep-set codfish-eyes.
But for a crescent-shaped scar on the left cheek--the result of an accident
for which I was responsible I should never have known him. But it was
indubitably Gunga Dass, and--for this I was thankful--an English-speaking
native who might at least tell me the meaning of all that I had gone through
that day.
The crowd retreated to some distance as I turned toward the miserable figure,
and ordered him to show me some method of escaping from the crate. He held a
freshly plucked crow in his hand, and in reply to my question climbed slowly
on a platform of sand which ran in front of the holes, and commenced lighting
a fire there in silence. Dried bents, sand-poppies, and driftwood burn
quickly; and I derived much consolation from the fact that he lit them with an
ordinary sulphur-match. When they were in a bright glow, and the crow was
neatly spitted in front thereof, Gunga Dass began without a word of preamble:
"There are only two kinds of men, Sar. The alive and the dead. When you are
dead you are dead, but when you are alive you live." (Here the crow demanded
his attention for an instant as it twirled before the fire in danger of being
burned to a cinder.) "If you die at home and do not die when you come to the
ghat to be burned you come here."
The nature of the reeking village was made plain now, and all that I had known
or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the fact just
communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first landed in
Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the existence, somewhere in
India, of a place to which such Hindus as had the misfortune to recover from
trance or catalepsy were conveyed and kept, and I recollect laughing heartily
at what I was then pleased to consider a traveler's tale.
Sitting at the bottom of the sand-trap, the memory of Watson's Hotel, with its
swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants, and the sallow-faced Armenian, rose
up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and I burst into a loud fit of
laughter. The contrast was too absurd!
Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean bird, watched me curiously. Hindus
seldom laugh, and his surroundings were not such as to move Gunga Dass to any
undue excess of hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly from the wooden spit
and as solemnly devoured it. Then he continued his story, which I give in his
own words:
"In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burned almost before you
are dead. When you come to the riverside the cold air, perhaps, makes you
alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on your nose and
mouth and you die conclusively. If you are rather more alive, more mud is put;
but if you are too lively they let you go and take you away. I was too lively,
and made protestation with anger against the indignities that they endeavored
to press upon me. In those days I was Brahmin and proud man.
Now I am dead man and eat"--here he eyed the well-gnawed breast bone with the
first sign of emotion that I had seen in him since we met--"crows, and other
things. They took me from my sheets when they saw that I was too lively and
gave me medicines for one week, and I survived successfully. Then they sent me
by rail from my place to Okara Station, with a man to take care of me; and at
Okara Station we met two other men, and they conducted we three on camels, in
the night, from Okara Station to this place, and they propelled me from the
top to the bottom, and the other two succeeded, and I have been here ever
since two and a half years. Once I was Brahmin and proud man, and now I eat
crows."
"There is no way of getting out?"
"None of what kind at all. When I first came I made experiments frequently and
all the others also, but we have always succumbed to the sand which is
precipitated upon our heads."
"But surely," I broke in at this point, "the river-front is open, and it is
worth while dodging the bullets; while at night"--I had already matured a
rough plan of escape which a natural instinct of selfishness forbade me
sharing with Gunga Dass. He, however, divined my unspoken thought almost as
soon as it was formed; and, to my intense astonishment, gave vent to a long
low chuckle of derision--the laughter, be it understood, of a superior or at
least of an equal.
"You will not"--he had dropped the Sir completely after his opening sentence--
"make any escape that way. But you can try. I have tried. Once only."
The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear which I had in vain attempted
to strive against overmastered me completely. My long fast--it was now close
upon ten o'clock, and I had eaten nothing since tiffin on the previous day--
combined with the violent and unnatural agitation of the ride had exhausted
me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled
myself against the pitiless sand-slope. I ran round the base of the crater,
blaspheming and praying by turns. I crawled out among the sedges of the river-
front, only to be driven back each time in an agony of nervous dread by the
rifle-bullets which cut up the sand round me--for I dared not face the death
of a mad dog among that hideous crowd--and finally fell, spent and raving, at
the curb of the well. No one had taken the slightest notion of an exhibition
which makes me blush hotly even when I think of it now.
Two or three men trod on my panting body as they drew water, but they were
evidently used to this sort of thing, and had no time to waste upon me. The
situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass, indeed, when he had banked the embers
of his fire with sand, was at some pains to throw half a cupful of fetid water
over my head, an attention for which I could have fallen on my knees and
thanked him, but he was laughing all the while in the same mirthless, wheezy
key that greeted me on my first attempt to force the shoals. And so, in a
semi-comatose condition, I lay till noon.
Then, being only a man after all, I felt hungry, and intimated as much to
Gunga Dass, whom I had begun to regard as my natural protector. Following the
impulse of the outer world when dealing with natives, I put my hand into my
pocket and drew out four annas. The absurdity of the gift struck me at once,
and I was about to replace the money.
Gunga Dass, however, was of a different opinion. "Give me the money," said he;
"all you have, or I will get help, and we will kill you!" All this as if it
were the most natural thing in the world!
A Briton's first impulse, I believe, is to guard the contents of his pockets;
but a moment's reflection convinced me of the futility of differing with the
one man who had it in his power to make me comfortable; and with whose help it
was possible that I might eventually escape from the crater. I gave him all
the money in my possession, Rs. 9-8-5--nine rupees eight annas and five pie--
for I always keep small change as bakshish when I am in camp. Gunga Dass
clutched the coins, and hid them at once in his ragged loin cloth, his
expression changing to something diabolical as he looked round to assure
himself that no one had observed us.
"Now I will give you something to eat," said he.
What pleasure the possession of my money could have afforded him I am unable
to say; but inasmuch as it did give him evident delight I was not sorry that I
had parted with it so readily, for I had no doubt that he would have had me
killed if I had refused. One does not protest against the vagaries of a den of
wild beasts; and my companions were lower than any beasts. While I devoured
what Gunga Dass had provided, a coarse chapatti and a cupful of the foul well-
water, the people showed not the faintest sign of curiosity--that curiosity
which is so rampant, as a rule, in an Indian village.
I could even fancy that they despised me. At all events they treated me with
the most chilling indifference, and Gunga Dass was nearly as bad. I plied him
with questions about the terrible village, and received extremely
unsatisfactory answers. So far as I could gather, it had been in existence
from time immemorial--whence I concluded that it was at least a century old--
and during that time no one had ever been known to escape from it. [I had to
control myself here with both hands, lest the blind terror should lay hold of
me a second time and drive me raving round the crater.] Gunga Dass took a
malicious pleasure in emphasizing this point and in watching me wince. Nothing
that I could do would induce him to tell me who the mysterious "They" were.
"It is so ordered," he would reply, "and I do not yet know any one who has
disobeyed the orders."
"Only wait till my servants find that I am missing," I retorted, "and I
promise you that this place shall be cleared off the face of the earth, and
I'll give you a lesson in civility, too, my friend."
"Your servants would be torn in pieces before they came near this place; and,
besides, you are dead, my dear friend. It is not your fault, of course, but
none the less you are dead and buried."
At irregular intervals supplies of food, I was told, were dropped down from
the land side into the amphitheatre, and the inhabitants fought for them like
wild beasts. When a man felt his death coming on he retreated to his lair and
died there. The body was sometimes dragged out of the hole and thrown on to
the sand, or allowed to rot where it lay.
The phrase "thrown on to the sand" caught my attention, and I asked Gunga Dass
whether this sort of thing was not likely to breed a pestilence.
"That." said he. with another of his wheezy chuckles, "you may see for
yourself subsequently. You will have much time to make observations."
Whereat, to his great delight, I winced once more and hastily continued the
conversation :--"And how do you live here from day to day? What do you do?"
The question elicited exactly the same answer as before coupled with the
information that "this place is like your European heaven; there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage."
Gunga Dass had been educated at a Mission School, and, as he himself admitted,
had he only changed his religion "like a wise man," might have avoided the
living grave which was now his portion. But as long as I was with him I fancy
he was happy.
Here was a Sahib, a representative of the dominant race, helpless as a child
and completely at the mercy of his native neighbors. In a deliberate lazy way
he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour
to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow
might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit. The burden of his
conversation was that there was no escape "of no kind whatever," and that I
should stay here till I died and was "thrown on to the sand." If it were
possible to forejudge the conversation of the Damned on the advent of a new
soul in their abode, I should say that they would speak as Gunga Dass did to
me throughout that long afternoon. I was powerless to protest or answer; all
my energies being devoted to a struggle against the inexplicable terror that
threatened to overwhelm me again and again. I can compare the feeling to
nothing except the struggles of a man against the overpowering nausea of the
Channel passage--only my agony was of the spirit and infinitely more terrible.
As the day wore on, the inhabitants began to appear in full strength to catch
the rays of the afternoon sun, which were now sloping in at the mouth of the
crater. They assembled in little knots, and talked among themselves without
even throwing a glance in my direction. About four o'clock, as far as I could
judge Gunga Dass rose and dived into his lair for a moment, emerging with a
live crow in his hands. The wretched bird was in a most draggled and
deplorable condition, but seemed to be in no way afraid of its master,
Advancing cautiously to the river front, Gunga Dass stepped from tussock to
tussock until he had reached a smooth patch of sand directly in the line of
the boat's fire. The occupants of the boat took no notice. Here he stopped,
and, with a couple of dexterous turns of the wrist, pegged the bird on its
back with outstretched wings. As was only natural, the crow began to shriek at
once and beat the air with its claws. In a few seconds the clamor had
attracted the attention of a bevy of wild crows on a shoal a few hundred yards
away, where they were discussing something that looked like a corpse. Half a
dozen crows flew over at once to see what was going on, and also, as it
proved, to attack the pinioned bird. Gunga Dass, who had lain down on a
tussock, motioned to me to be quiet, though I fancy this was a needless
precaution. In a moment, and before I could see how it happened, a wild crow,
who had grappled with the shrieking and helpless bird, was entangled in the
latter's claws, swiftly disengaged by Gunga Dass, and pegged down beside its
companion in adversity. Curiosity, it seemed, overpowered the rest of the
flock, and almost before Gunga Dass and I had time to withdraw to the tussock,
two more captives were struggling in the upturned claws of the decoys. So the
chase--if I can give it so dignified a name--continued until Gunga Dass had
captured seven crows. Five of them he throttled at once, reserving two for
further operations another day. I was a good deal impressed by this, to me,
novel method of securing food, and complimented Gunga Dass on his skill.
"It is nothing to do," said he. "Tomorrow you must do it for me. You are
stronger than I am."
This calm assumption of superiority Upset me not a little, and I answered
peremptorily;--"Indeed, you old ruffian! What do you think I have given you
money for?"
"Very well," was the unmoved reply. "Perhaps not tomorrow, nor the day after,
nor subsequently; but in the end, and for many years, you will catch crows and
eat crows, and you will thank your European God that you have crows to catch
and eat."
I could have cheerfully strangled him for this; but judged it best under the
circumstances to smother my resentment. An hour later I was eating one of the
crows; and, as Gunga Dass had said, thanking my God that I had a crow to eat.
Never as long as I live shall I forget that evening meal. The whole population
were squatting on the hard sand platform opposite their dens, huddled over
tiny fires of refuse and dried rushes. Death, having once laid his hand upon
these men and forborne to strike, seemed to stand aloof from them now; for
most of our company were old men, bent and worn and twisted with years, and
women aged to all appearance as the Fates themselves. They sat together in
knots and talked--God only knows what they found to discuss--in low equable
tones, curiously in contrast to the strident babble with which natives are
accustomed to make day hideous. Now and then an access of that sudden fury
which had possessed me in the morning would lay hold on a man or woman; and
with yells and imprecations the sufferer would attack the steep slope until,
baffled and bleeding, he fell back on the platform incapable of moving a limb.
The others would never even raise their eyes when this happened, as men too
well aware of the futility of their fellows' attempts and wearied with their
useless repetition. I saw four such outbursts in the course of the evening.
Gunga Dass took an eminently business-like view of my situation, and while we
were dining--I can afford to laugh at the recollection now, but it was painful
enough at the time- propounded the terms on which he would consent to "do" for
me. My nine rupees eight annas, he argued, at the rate of three annas a day,
would provide me with food for fifty-one days, or about seven weeks; that is
to say, he would be willing to cater for me for that length of time. At the
end of it I was to look after myself. For a further consideration--videlicet
my boots--he would be willing to allow me to occupy the den next to his own,
and would supply me with as much dried grass for bedding as he could spare.
"Very well, Gunga Dass," I replied; "to the first terms I cheerfully agree,
but, as there is nothing on earth to prevent my killing you as you sit here
and taking everything that you have" (I thought of the two invaluable crows at
the time), "I flatly refuse to give you my boots and shall take whichever den
I please."
The stroke was a bold one, and I was glad when I saw that it had succeeded.
Gunga Dass changed his tone immediately, and disavowed all intention of asking
for my boots. At the time it did not strike me as at all strange that I, a
Civil Engineer, a man of thirteen years' standing in the Service, and, I
trust, an average Englishman, should thus calmly threaten murder and violence
against the man who had, for a consideration it is true, taken me under his
wing. I had left the world, it seemed, for centuries. I was as certain then as
I am now of my own existence, that in the accursed settlement there was no law
save that of the strongest; that the living dead men had thrown behind them
every canon of the world which had cast them out; and that I had to depend for
my own life on my strength and vigilance alone. The crew of the ill-fated
Mignonette are the only men who would understand my frame of mind. "At
present," I argued to myself, "I am strong and a match for six of these
wretches. It is imperatively necessary that I should, for my own sake, keep
both health and strength until the hour of my release comes--if it ever does."
Fortified with these resolutions, I ate and drank as much as I could, and made
Gunga Dass understand that I intended to be his master, and that the least
sign of insubordination on his part would be visited with the only punishment
I had it in my power to inflict--sudden and violent death. Shortly after this
I went to bed.
That is to say, Gunga Dass gave me a double armful of dried bents which I
thrust down the mouth of the lair to the right of his, and followed myself,
feet foremost; the hole running about nine feet into the sand with a slight
downward inclination, and being neatly shored with timbers. From my den, which
faced the river-front, I was able to watch the waters of the Sutlej flowing
past under the light of a young moon and compose myself to sleep as best I
might.
The horrors of that night I shall never forget. My den was nearly as narrow as
a coffin, and the sides had been worn smooth and greasy by the contact of
innumerable naked bodies, added to which it smelled abominably. Sleep was
altogether out of question to one in my excited frame of mind. As the night
wore on, it seemed that the entire amphitheatre was filled with legions of
unclean devils that, trooping up from the shoals below, mocked the
unfortunates in their lairs.
Personally I am not of an imaginative temperament,--very few Engineers are,--
but on that occasion I was as completely prostrated with nervous terror as any
woman. After half an hour or so, however, I was able once more to calmly
review my chances of escape. Any exit by the steep sand walls was, of course,
impracticable. I had been thoroughly convinced of this some time before. It
was possible, just possible, that I might, in the uncertain moonlight, safely
run the gauntlet of the rifle shots. The place was so full of terror for me
that I was prepared to undergo any risk in leaving it. Imagine my delight,
then, when after creeping stealthily to the river-front I found that the
infernal boat was not there. My freedom lay before me in the next few steps!
By walking out to the first shallow pool that lay at the foot of the
projecting left horn of the horseshoe, I could wade across, turn the flank of
the crater, and make my way inland. Without a moment's hesitation I marched
briskly past the tussocks where Gunga Dass had snared the crows, and out in
the direction of the smooth white sand beyond. My first step from the tufts of
dried grass showed me how utterly futile was any hope of escape; for, as I put
my foot down, I felt an indescribable drawing, sucking motion of the sand
below. Another moment and my leg was swallowed up nearly to the knee. In the
moonlight the whole surface of the sand seemed to be shaken with devilish
delight at my disappointment. I struggled clear, sweating with terror and
exertion, back to the tussocks behind me and fell on my face.
My only means of escape from the semicircle was protected with a quicksand!
How long I lay I have not the faintest idea; but I was roused at last by the
malevolent chuckle of Gunga Dass at my ear. "I would advise you, Protector of
the Poor" (the ruffian was speaking English) "to return to your house. It is
unhealthy to lie down here. Moreover, when the boat returns, you will most
certainly be rifled at." He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn,
chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the
man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and
followed him to the platform below the burrows.
Suddenly, and futilely as I thought while I spoke, I asked--"Gunga Dass, what
is the good of the boat if I can't get out anyhow?" I recollect that even in
my deepest trouble I had been speculating vaguely on the waste of ammunition
in guarding an already well protected foreshore.
Gunga Dass laughed again and made answer:--"They have the boat only in
daytime. It is for the reason that there is a way. I hope we shall have the
pleasure of your company for much longer time. It is a pleasant spot when you
have been here some years and eaten roast crow long enough."
I staggered, numbed and helpless, toward the fetid burrow allotted to me, and
fell asleep. An hour or so later I was awakened by a piercing scream--the
shrill, high-pitched scream of a horse in pain. Those who have once heard that
will never forget the sound. I found some little difficulty in scrambling out
of the burrow. When I was in the open, I saw Pornic, my poor old Pornic, lying
dead on the sandy soil. How they had killed him I cannot guess. Gunga Dass
explained that horse was better than crow, and "greatest good of greatest
number is political maxim. We are now Republic, Mister Jukes, and you are
entitled to a fair share of the beast. If you like, we will pass a vote of
thanks. Shall I propose?"
Yes, we were a Republic indeed! A Republic of wild beasts penned at the bottom
of a pit, to eat and fight and sleep till we died. I attempted no protest of
any kind, but sat down and stared at the hideous sight in front of me. In less
time almost than it takes me to write this, Pornic's body was divided, in some
unclear way or other; the men and women had dragged the fragments on to the
platform and were preparing their normal meal. Gunga Dass cooked mine. The
almost irresistible impulse to fly at the sand walls until I was wearied laid
hold of me afresh, and I had to struggle against it with all my might. Gunga
Dass was offensively jocular till I told him that if he addressed another
remark of any kind whatever to me I should strangle him where he sat. This
silenced him till silence became insupportable, and I bade him say something.
"You will live here till you die like the other Feringhi," he said, coolly,
watching me over the fragment of gristle that he was gnawing.
"What other Sahib, you swine? Speak at once, and don't stop to tell me a lie."
"He is over there," answered Gunga Dass, pointing to a burrow-mouth about four
doors ta the left of my own. "You can see for yourself. He died in the burrow
as you will die, and I will die, and as all these men and women and the one
child will also die."
"For pity's sake tell me all you know about him. Who was he? When did he come,
and when did he die?"
This appeal was a weak step on my part. Gunga Dass only leered and replied:--
"I will not--unless you give me something first."
Then I recollected where I was, and struck the man between the eyes, partially
stunning him. He stepped down from the platform at once, and, cringing and
fawning and weeping and attempting to embrace my feet, led me round to the
burrow which he had indicated.
"I know nothing whatever about the gentleman. Your God be my witness that I do
not. He was as anxious to escape as you were, and he was shot from the boat,
though we all did all things to prevent him from attempting. He was shot
here." Gunga Dass laid his hand on his lean stomach and bowed to the earth.
"Well, and what then? Go on!"
"And then--and then, Your Honor, we carried him in to his house and gave him
water, and put wet cloths on the wound, and he laid down in his house and gave
up the ghost."
"In how long? In how long?"
"About half an hour, after he received his wound. I call Vishnu to witness,"
yelled the wretched man, "that I did everything for him. Everything which was
possible, that I did!"
He threw himself down on the ground and clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts
about Gunga Dass's benevolence, and kicked him off as he lay protesting.
"I believe you robbed him of everything he had. But I can find out in a minute
or two. How long was the Sahib here?"
"Nearly a year and a half. I think he must have gone mad. But hear me swear,
Protector of the Poor! Won't Your Honor hear me swear that I never touched an
article that belonged to him? What is Your Worship going to do?"
I had taken Gunga Dass by the waist and had hauled him on to the platform
opposite the deserted burrow. As I did so I thought of my wretched fellow-
prisoner's unspeakable misery among all these horrors for eighteen months, and
the final agony of dying like a rat in a hole, with a bullet-wound in the
stomach. Gunga Dass fancied I was going to kill him and howled pitifully. The
rest of the population, in the plethora that follows a full flesh meal,
watched us without stirring.
"Go inside, Gunga Dass," said I, "and fetch it out."
I was feeling sick and faint with horror now. Gunga Dass nearly rolled off the
platform and howled aloud.
"But I am Brahmin, Sahib--a high-caste Brahmin. By your soul, by your father's
soul, do not make me do this thing!"
"Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father's soul, in you go!" I said,
and, seizing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head into the mouth of the
burrow, kicked the rest of him in, and, sitting down, covered my face with my
hands.
At the end of a few minutes I heard a rustle and a creak; then Gunga Dass in a
sobbing, choking whisper speaking to himself; then a soft thud--and I
uncovered my eyes.
The dry sand had turned the corpse entrusted to its keeping into a yellow-
brown mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while I examined it.
The body--clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much stained and worn, with
leather pads on the shoulders--was that of a man between thirty and forty,
above middle height, with light, sandy hair, long mustache, and a rough
unkempt beard. The left canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion of
the lobe of the right ear was gone. On the second finger of the left hand was
a ring--a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might
have been either "B.K." or "B.L." On the third finger of the right hand was a
silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. Gunga
Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my
feet, and, covering the face of the body with my handkerchief, I turned to
examine these. I give the full list in the hope that it may lead to the
identification of the unfortunate man:
1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the edge; much worn and blackened;
bound with string at the crew.
2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken.
3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or nickel name-plate, marked with
monogram "B.K."
4. Envelope, postmark Undecipherable, bearing a Victorian stamp, addressed to
"Miss Mon-" (rest illegible) -"ham"-"nt."
5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with pencil. First forty-five pages
blank; four and a half illegible; fifteen others filled with private memoranda
relating chiefly to three persons--a Mrs. L. Singleton, abbreviated several
times to "Lot Single," "Mrs. S. May," and "Garmison," referred to in places as
"Jerry" or "Jack."
6.Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. Blade snapped short. Buck's horn,
diamond cut, with swivel and ring on the butt; fragment of cotton cord
attached.
It must not be supposed that I inventoried all these things on the spot as
fully as I have here written them down. The notebook first attracted my
attention, and I put it in my pocket with a view of studying it later on.
The rest of the articles I conveyed to my burrow for safety's sake, and there
being a methodical man, I inventoried them. I then returned to the corpse and
ordered Gunga Dass to help me to carry it out to the river-front. While we
were engaged in this, the exploded shell of an old brown cartridge dropped out
of one of the pockets and rolled at my feet. Gunga Dass had not seen it; and I
fell to thinking that a man does not carry exploded cartridge-cases,
especially "browns," which will not bear loading twice, about with him when
shooting. In other words, that cartridge-case had been fired inside the
crater. Consequently there must be a gun somewhere. I was on the verge of
asking Gunga Dass, but checked myself, knowing that he would lie. We laid the
body down on the edge of the quicksand by the tussocks. It was my intention to
push it out and let it be swallowed up--the only possible mode of burial that
I could think of. I ordered Gunga Dass to go away.
Then I gingerly put the corpse out on the quicksand. In doing so--it was lying
face downward--I tore the frail and rotten khaki shooting-coat open,
disclosing a hideous cavity in the back. I have already told you that the dry
sand had, as it were, mummified the body. A moment's glance showed that the
gaping hole had been caused by a gun-shot wound; the gun must have been fired
with the muzzle almost touching the back. The shooting-coat, being intact, had
been drawn over the body after death, which must have been instantaneous. The
secret of the poor wretch's death was plain to me in a flash. Some one of the
crater, presumably Gunga Dass, must have shot him with his own gun--the gun
that fitted the brown cartridges. He had never attempted to escape in the face
of the rifle-fire from the boat.
I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it sink from sight literally in a few
seconds. I shuddered as I watched. In a dazed, half-conscious way I turned to
peruse the notebook. A stained and discolored slip of paper bad been inserted
between the binding and the back, and dropped out as I opened the pages. This
is what it contained:--"Four out from crow-clump: three left; nine out; two
right; three back; two left; fourteen out; two left; seven out; one left; nine
back; two right; six back; four right; seven back." The paper had been burned
and charred at the edges. What it meant I could not understand. I sat down on
the dried bents turning it over and over between my fingers, until I was aware
of Gunga Dass standing immediately behind me with glowing eyes and
outstretched hands.
"Have you got it?" he panted. "Will you not let me look at it also? I swear
that I will return it."
"Got what? Return what?" asked.
"That which you have in your hands. It will help us both." He stretched out
his long, bird-like talons, trembling with eagerness.
"I could never find it," he continued. "He had secreted it about his person.
Therefore I shot him, but nevertheless I was unable to obtain it."
Gunga Dass had quite forgotten his little fiction about the rifle-bullet. I
received the information perfectly calmly. Morality is blunted by consorting
with the Dead who are alive.
"What on earth are you raving about? What is it you want me to give you?"
"The piece of paper in the notebook. It will help us both. Oh, you fool! You
fool! Can you not see what it will do for us? We shall escape!"
His voice rose almost to a scream, and he danced with excitement before me. I
own I was moved at the chance of my getting away.
"Don't skip! Explain yourself. Do you mean to say that this slip of paper will
help us? What does it mean?"
"Read it aloud! Read it aloud! I beg and I pray you to read it aloud."
I did so. Gunga Dass listened delightedly, and drew an irregular line in the
sand with his fingers.
"See now! It was the length of his gun-barrels without the stock. I have those
barrels. Four gun-barrels out from the place where I caught crows straight
out; do you follow me? Then three left--Ah! how well I remember when that man
worked it out night after night Then nine out, and so on. Out is always
straight before you across the quicksand. He told me so before I killed him."
"But if you knew all this why didn't you get out before?"
"I did not know it. He told me that he was working it out a year and a half
ago, and how he was working it out night after night when the boat had gone
away, and he could get out near the quicksand safely. Then he said that we
would get away together. But I was afraid that he would leave me behind one
night when he had worked it all out, and so I shot him. Besides, it is not
advisable that the men who once get in here should escape. Only I, and I am a
Brahmin."
The prospect of escape had brought Gunga Dass's caste back to him. He stood
up, walked about and gesticulated violently. Eventually I managed to make him
talk soberly, and he told me how this Englishman had spent six months night
after night in exploring, inch by inch, the passage across the quicksand; how
he had declared it to be simplicity itself up to within about twenty yards of
the river bank after turning the flank of the left horn of the horseshoe. This
much he had evidently not completed when Gunga Dass shot him with his own gun.
In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities of escape I recollect shaking
hands effusively with Gunga Dass, after we had decided that we were to make an
attempt to get away that very night. It was weary work waiting throughout the
afternoon.
About ten o'clock, as far as I could judge, when the Moon had just risen above
the lip of the crater, Gunga Dass made a move for his burrow to bring out the
gun-barrels whereby to measure our path. All the other wretched inhabitants
had retired to their lairs long ago. The guardian boat drifted downstream some
hours before, and we were utterly alone by the crow-clump. Gunga Dass, while
carrying the gun-barrels, let slip the piece of paper which was to be our
guide. I stooped down hastily to recover it, and, as I did so, I was aware
that the diabolical Brahmin was aiming a violent blow at the back of my head
with the gun-barrels. It was too late to turn round. I must have received the
blow somewhere on the nape of my neck. A hundred thousand fiery stars danced
before my eyes, and I fell forwards senseless at the edge of, the quicksand.
When I recovered consciousness, the Moon was going down, and I was sensible of
intolerable pain in the back of my head. Gunga Dass had disappeared and my
mouth was full of blood. I lay down again and prayed that I might die without
more ado. Then the unreasoning fury which I had before mentioned, laid hold
upon me, and I staggered inland toward the walls of the crater. It seemed that
some one was calling to me in a whisper--"Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!" exactly as my
bearer used to call me in the morning I fancied that I was delirious until a
handful of sand fell at my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peering down
into the amphitheatre--the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my
collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his hand and
showed a rope. I motioned. staggering to and fro for the while, that he should
throw it down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes knotted together, with
a loop at one end. I slipped the loop over my head and under my arms; heard
Dunnoo urge something forward; was conscious that I was being dragged, face
downward, up the steep sand slope, and the next instant found myself choked
and half fainting on the sand hills overlooking the crater. Dunnoo, with his
face ashy grey in the moonlight, implored me not to stay but to get back to my
tent at once.
It seems that he had tracked Pornic's footprints fourteen miles across the
sands to the crater; had returned and told my servants, who flatly refused to
meddle with any one, white or black, once fallen into the hideous Village of
the Dead; whereupon Dunnoo had taken one of my ponies and a couple of punkah-
ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled me out as I have described.
To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold mohur a
month--a sum which I still think far too little for the services he has
rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish spot again,
or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass I
have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive in giving this
to be published is the hope that some one may possibly identify, from the
details and the inventory which I have given above, the corpse of the man in
the olive-green hunting-suit.
* * * * * * * *
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.
The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to
follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances
which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I have
still to be brother to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship with what
might have been a veritable King, and was promised the reversion of a Kingdom-
-army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all complete. But, today, I greatly
fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go hunt it for myself.
The beginning of everything was in a railway-train upon the road to Mhow from
Ajmir. There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated travelling,
not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-Class, but by
Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the
Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is
Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which
is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not buy from refreshment-
rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the
native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the roadside water. This is why in hot
weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers
are most properly looked down upon.
My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when
the big black-browed gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the
custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a
vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whisky. He told tales of
things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into
which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for a
few days' food.
"If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows
where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't seventy millions of
revenue the land would be paying--it's seven hundred millions," said he; and
as I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to agree with him.
We talked politics,--the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from the under
side where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off,--and we talked postal
arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next
station to Ajmir, the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as
you travel westward. My friend had no money beyond eight annas which he wanted
for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before
mentioned. Further, I was going into a wilderness where, though I should
resume touch with the Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was,
therefore, unable to help him in any way.
"We might threaten a Station-master, and make him send a wire on tick," said
my friend, "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me, and I've got my
hands full these days. Did you say you were travelling back along this line
within any days?"
"Within ten," I said.
"Can't you make it eight?" said he. "Mine is rather urgent business."
"I can send your telegrams within ten days if that will serve you," I said.
"I couldn't trust the wire to fetch him, now I think of it. It's this way. He
leaves Delhi on the 23rd for Bombay. That means he'll be running through Ajmir
about the night of the 23rd."
"But I'm going into the Indian Desert," I explained.
"Well and good," said he. "You'll be changing at Marwar Junction to get into
Jodhpore territory,--you must do that,--and he'll be coming through Marwar
Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at
Marwar Junction on that time? 'T won't be inconveniencing you, because I know
that there's precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India
States--even though you pretend to be correspondent of the 'Backwoodsman.' "
"Have you ever tried that trick?" I asked.
"Again and again, but the Residents find you out, and then you get escorted to
the Border before you've time to get your knife into them. But about my friend
here. I must give him a word o' mouth to tell him what's come to me, or else
he won't know where to go. I would take it more than kind of you if you was to
come out of Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to
him, 'He has gone South for the week.' He'll know what that means. He's a big
man with a red beard, and a great swell he is.
You'll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage round him in a
Second-class apartment. But don't you be afraid.
Slip down the window and say, 'He has gone South for the week,' and he'll
tumble. It's only cutting your time of stay in those parts by two days. I ask
you as a stranger--going to the West," he said, with emphasis.
"Where have you come from?" said I.
"From the East," said he, "and I am hoping that you will give him the message
on the square--for the sake of my Mother as well as your own."
Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers;
but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.
"It's more than a little matter," said he, "and that's why I asked you to do
it--and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage
at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. You'll be sure to
remember. I get out at the next station, and I must hold on there till he
comes or sends me what I want."
"I'll give the message if I catch him," I said, "and for the sake of your
Mother as well as mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't try to run the
Central India States just now as the correspondent of the 'Backwoodsman.'
There's a real one knocking about here, and it might lead to trouble."
"Thank you," said he, simply; "and when will the swine be gone? I can't starve
because he's ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of the Degumber Rajah down
here about his father's widow, and give him a jump."
"What did he do to his father's widow, then?"
"Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from a
beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man that would dare going into
the State to get hush-money for it. They'll try to poison me, same as they did
in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you'll give the man at Marwar
Junction my message?"
He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more
than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small
Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste
before. They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The
Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw
light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke
correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-
hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the
internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are
kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased
from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth,
full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one
side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I
did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes
of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and
Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out
upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of leaves,
and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It
was all in the day's work.
Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I had
promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny
little, happy-go-lucky, native managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay
Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived just as I got in,
and I had just time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There
was only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window and looked down
upon a flaming-red beard, half covered by a railway-rug. That was my man, fast
asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs.
He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light of the lamps.
It was a great and shining face.
"Tickets again?" said he.
"No," said I. "I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He has
gone South for the week!"
The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes.
"He has gone South for the week," he repeated. "Now that's just like his
impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything? 'Cause I won't."
"He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights die out in
the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off the sands. I
climbed into my own train--not an Intermediate carriage this time--and went to
sleep.
If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a
memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having done my
duty was my only reward.
Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do any good
if they foregathered and personated correspondents of newspapers, and might,
if they blackmailed one of the little rat-trap States of Central India or
Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious difficulties. I therefore took
some trouble to describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who
would be interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later informed,
in having them headed back from the Degumber borders.
Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there were no Kings
and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper
office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of
discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will
instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a
back slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been
overpassed for command sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten,
twelve, or twenty- four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection;
missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from
their regular vehicles of abuse, and swear at a brother missionary under
special patronage of the editorial We. Stranded theatrical companies troop up
to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return
from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent
punka-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable swords and
axletrees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their
disposal; tea companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office
pens; secretaries of ball committees clamour to have the glories of their last
dance more fully described; strange ladies rustle in and say, "I want a
hundred lady's cards printed at once, please," which is manifestly part of an
Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk
Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all
the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on
the Continent, and Empires are saying, "You're another," and Mister Gladstone
is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black
copyboys are whining, "kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh" ("Copy wanted"), like tired bees,
and most of the paper is as blank as Modred's shield.
But that is the amusing part of the year. There are six other months when none
ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch up to the top of the
glass, and the office is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press-
machines are red-hot to touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of
amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone
becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men
and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly heat covers you with a
garment, and you sit down and write: "A slight increase of sickness is
reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic
in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District
authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we
record the death," etc.
Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and reporting the
better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings
continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks
that a daily paper really ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all
the people at the Hill-stations in the middle of their amusements say, "Good
gracious! why can't the paper be sparkling? I'm sure there's plenty going on
up here."
That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the advertisements say, "must be
experienced to be appreciated."
It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper began
running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is to say Sunday
morning, after the custom of a London paper. This was a great convenience, for
immediately after the paper was put to bed the dawn would lower the
thermometer from 96 degrees to almost 84 degrees for half an hour, and in that
chill--you have no idea how cold is 84 degrees on the grass until you begin to
pray for it--a very tired man could get off to sleep ere the heat roused him.
One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A
King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to die or get a new
Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the
world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in
order to catch the telegram.
It was a pitchy-black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo,
the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and
pretending that the rain was on its heels.
Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the
flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a
shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type
ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but
naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called for water.
The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off,
though the loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth
stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the
event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and
whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of the
inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the
heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three
o'clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that
all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have
shrieked aloud.
Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits. I
rose to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front of me. The first
one said, "It's him!" The second said, "So it is!" And they both laughed
almost as loudly as the machinery roared, and mopped their foreheads. "We seed
there was a light burning across the road, and we were sleeping in that ditch
there for coolness, and I said to my friend here, "The office is open. Let's
come along and speak to him as turned us back from Degumber State," said the
smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow
was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no mistaking the
eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.
I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble with
loafers. "What do you want?" I asked.
"Half an hour's talk with you, cool and comfortable, in the office," said the
red-bearded man. "We'd like some drink,--the Contrack doesn't begin yet,
Peachey, so you needn't look,--but what we really want is advice. We don't
want money. We ask you as a favour, because we found out you did us a bad turn
about Degumber State."
I led from the press-room to the stifling office with the maps on the walls,
and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. "That's something like," said he.
"This was the proper shop to come to.
"Now, Sir, let me introduce you to Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and
Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the
better, for we have been most things in our time--soldier, sailor, compositor,
photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the
'Backwoodsman' when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so
am I. Look at us first, and see that's sure. It will save you cutting into my
talk. We'll take one of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us light up."
I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, so I gave them each a tepid
whisky-and-soda.
"Well and good," said Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his
moustache. "Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot.
We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that,
and we have decided that India isn't big enough for such as us."
They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot's beard seemed to fill half
the room and Carnehan's shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big
table. Carnehan continued: "The country isn't half worked out because they
that governs it won't let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in
governing it, and you can't lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil,
nor anything like that, without all the Government saying, 'Leave it alone,
and let us govern.' Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go
away to some other place where a man isn't crowded and can come to his own. We
are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink,
and we have signed a Contrack on that.
Therefore we are going away to be Kings."
"Kings in our own right," muttered Dravot.
"Yes, of course," I said. "You've been tramping in the sun, and it's a very
warm night, and hadn't you better sleep over the notion? Come tomorrow."
"Neither drunk nor sunstruck," said Dravot. "We have slept over the notion
half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that
there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack.
They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it's the top right-hand corner of
Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two
and thirty heathen idols there, and we'll be the thirty-third and fourth. It's
a mountaineous country, the women of those parts are very beautiful."
"But that is provided against in the Contrack," said Carnehan. "Neither Women
nor Liquor, Daniel."
"And that's all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight,
and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to drill men can always
be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find, 'D' you
want to vanquish your foes?' and we will show him how to drill men; for that
we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize
his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty."
"You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty miles across the Border," I said.
"You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It's one mass
of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it.
The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn't do
anything."
"That's more like," said Carnehan. "If you could think us a little more mad we
would be more pleased. We have come to you to know about this country, to read
a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are
fools and to show us your books." He turned to the bookcases.
"Are you at all in earnest?" I said.
"A little," said Dravot, sweetly. "As big a map as you have got, even if it's
all blank where Kafiristan is, and any books you've got. We can read, though
we aren't very educated."
I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map of India and two smaller
Frontier maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
and the men consulted them.
"See here!" said Dravot, his thumb on the map. "Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and
me know the road. We was there with Robert's Army. We'll have to turn off to
the right at Jagdallak through Laghmann territory. Then we get among the
hills--fourteen thousand feet--fifteen thousand--it will be cold work there,
but it don't look very far on the map."
I handed him Wood on the "Sources of the Oxus." Carnehan was deep in the
"Encyclopaedia."
"They're a mixed lot," said Dravot, reflectively; "and it won't help us to
know the names of their tribes. The more tribes the more they'll fight, and
the better for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang. H'mm!"
"But all the information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can
be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it really. Here's the file of
the 'United Services' Institute.' Read what Bellew says."
"Blow Bellew!" said Carnehan. "Dan, they're a stinkin' lot of heathens, but
this book here says they think they're related to us English."
I smoked while the men poured over Raverty, Wood, the maps, and the
"Encyclopaedia."
"There is no use your waiting," said Dravot, politely. "It's about four
o'clock now. We'll go before six o'clock if you want to sleep, and we won't
steal any of the papers. Don't you sit up. We're two harmless lunatics, and if
you come tomorrow evening down to the Serai we'll say goodbye to you."
"You are two fools," I answered. "You'll be turned back at the Frontier or cut
up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a
recommendation down-country? I can help you to the chance of work next week."
"Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, thank you," said Dravot. "It
isn't so easy being a King as it looks. When we've got our Kingdom in going
order we'll let you know, and you can come up and help us govern it."
"Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that?" said Carnehan, with subdued
pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet of notepaper on which was written the
following. I copied it, then and there, as a curiosity.
This Contrack between me and you persuing witnesseth in the name of God--
Amen and so forth.
(One) That me and you will settle this matter together; i.e., to be Kings of
Kafiristan.
(Two)That you and me will not, while this matter is being settled, look at
any Liquor, nor any Woman, black, white, or brown, so as to get mixed
up with one or the other harmful.
(Three) That we conduct ourselves with Dignity and Discretion, and if one of
us gets into trouble the other will stay by him.
Signed by you and me this day.
Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan.
Daniel Dravot.
Both Gentlemen at Large.
"There was no need for the last article," said Carnehan, blushing modestly;
"but it looks regular. Now you know the sort of men that loafers are,--we are
loafers, Dan, until we get out of India,--and do you think that we would sign
a Contrack like that unless we was in earnest? We have kept away from the two
things that make life worth having."
"You won't enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic
adventure. Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go away before nine
o'clock."
I left them still poring over the maps and making notes on the back of the
"Contrack." "Be sure to come down to the Serai tomorrow," were their parting
words.
The Kumharsen Serai is the great foursquare sink of humanity where the strings
of camels and horses from the North load and unload. All the nationalities of
Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh
and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You can
buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep, and
musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing. In the
afternoon I went down to see whether my friends intended to keep their word or
were lying there drunk.
A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely
twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under
the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the
inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks of laughter.
"The priest is mad," said a horse-dealer to me. "He is going up to Kabul to
sell toys to the Amir. He will either be raised to honour or have his head cut
off. He came in here this morning and has been behaving madly ever since."
"The witless are under the protection of God," stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg
in broken Hindi. "They foretell future events."
"Would they could have foretold that my caravan would have been cut up by the
Shinwaris almost within shadow of the Pass!" grunted the Eusufzai agent of a
Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been diverted into the hands of other
robbers just across the Border, and whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock
of the bazaar. "Ohe', priest, whence come you and whither do you go?"
"From Roum have I come," shouted the priest, waving his whirligig; "from Roum,
blown by the breath of a hundred devils across the sea! O thieves, robbers,
liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers! Who will take
the Protected of God to the North to sell charms that are never still to the
Amir? The camels shall not gall, the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives
shall remain faithful while they are away, of the men who give me place in
their caravan. Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a
golden slipper with a silver heel? The protection of Pir Khan be upon his
labours!" He spread out the skirts of his gabardine and pirouetted between the
lines of tethered horses.
"There starts a caravan from Peshawar to Kabul in twenty days, Huzrut," said
the Eusufzai trader. "My camels go therewith. Do thou also go and bring us
good luck."
"I will go even now!" shouted the priest. "I will depart upon my winged
camels, and be at Peshawar in a day! Ho! Hazar Mir Khan," he yelled to his
servant, "drive out the camels, but let me first mount my own."
He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, turning round to me,
cried, "Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a
charm--an amulet that shall make thee King of Kafiristan."
Then the light broke upon me, and I followed the two camels out of the Serai
till we reached open road and the priest halted.
"What d' you think o' that?" said he in English. "Carnehan can't talk their
patter, so I've made him my servant. He makes a handsome servant. 'T isn't for
nothing that I've been knocking about the country for fourteen years. Didn't I
do that talk neat? We'll hitch on to a caravan at Peshawar till we get to
Jagdallak, and then we'll see if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike
into Kafiristan. Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor'! Put your hand under the
camelbags and tell me what you feel."
I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and another.
"Twenty of 'em," said Dravot, placidly. "Twenty of 'em and ammunition to
correspond, under the whirligigs and the mud dolls."
"Heaven help you if you are caught with those things!" I said. "A Martini is
worth her weight in silver among the Pathans."
"Fifteen hundred rupees of capital--every rupee we could beg, borrow, or
steal--are invested on these two camels," said Dravot.
"We won't get caught. We're going through the Khaiber with a regular caravan.
Who'd touch a poor mad priest?"
"Have you got everything you want?" I asked, overcome with astonishment.
"Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a memento of your kindness, Brother. You
did me a service yesterday, and that time in Marwar. Half my Kingdom shall you
have, as the saying is." I slipped a small charm compass from my watch-chain
and handed it up to the priest.
"Goodbye," said Dravot, giving me hand cautiously. "It's the last time we'll
shake hands with an Englishman these many days. Shake hands with him,
Carnehan," he cried, as the second camel passed me.
Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then the camels passed away along the
dusty road, and I was left alone to wonder. My eye could detect no failure in
the disguises. The scene in the Serai proved that they were complete to the
native mind. There was just the chance, therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot
would be able to wander through Afghanistan without detection. But, beyond,
they would find death--certain and awful death.
Ten days later a native correspondent, giving me the news of the day from
Peshawar, wound up his letter with: "There has been much laughter here on
account of a certain mad priest who is going in his estimation to sell petty
gauds and insignificant trinkets which he ascribes as great charms to H. H.
the Amir of Bokhara. He passed through Peshawar and associated himself to the
Second Summer caravan that goes to Kabul. The merchants are pleased because
through superstition they imagine that such mad fellows bring good fortune."
The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them, but that
night a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice.
The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again. Summer
passed and winter thereafter, and came and passed again. The daily paper
continued and I with it, and upon the third summer there fell a hot night, a
night issue, and a strained waiting for something to be telegraphed from the
other side of the world, exactly as had happened before. A few great men had
died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter, and some of
the trees in the office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the
difference.
I passed over to the press-room, and went through just such a scene as I have
already described. The nervous tension was stronger than it had been two years
before, and I felt the heat more acutely. At three o'clock I cried, "Print
off," and turned to go, when there crept to my chair what was left of a man.
He was bent into a circle, his head was sunk between his shoulders, and he
moved his feet one over the other like a bear. I could hardly see whether he
walked or crawled--this rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name,
crying that he was come back. "Can you give me a drink?" he whimpered. "For
the Lord's sake, give me a drink!"
I went back to the office, the man following with groans of pain, and I turned
up the lamp.
"Don't you know me?" he gasped, dropping into a chair, and he turned his drawn
face, surmounted by a shock of gray hair, to the light.
I looked at him intently. Once before had I seen eyebrows that met over the
nose in an inch-broad black band, but for the life of me I could not tell
where.
"I don't know you," I said, handing him the whisky. "What can I do for you?"
He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in spite of the suffocating
heat.
"I've come back," he repeated; "and I was the King of Kafiristan--me and
Dravot--crowned Kings we was! In this office we settled it--you setting there
and giving us the books. I am Peachey,--Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan,--and
you've been setting here ever since--O Lord!"
I was more than a little astonished, and expressed my feelings accordingly.
"It's true," said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing his feet, which were
wrapped in rags--"true as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads--
me and Dravot--poor Dan--oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not
though I begged of him!"
"Take the whisky," I said, "and take your own time. Tell me all you can
recollect of everything from beginning to end. You got across the Border on
your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest and you his servant. Do you
remember that?"
"I ain't mad--yet, but I shall be that way soon. Of course I remember. Keep
looking at me, or maybe my words will go all to pieces. Keep looking at me in
my eyes and don't say anything."
I leaned forward and looked into his face as steadily as I could. He dropped
one hand upon the table and I grasped it by the wrist. It was twisted like a
bird's claw, and upon the back was a ragged, red, diamond-shaped scar.
"No, don't look there. Look at me," said Carnehan. "That comes afterward, but
for the Lord's sake don't distrack me. We left with that caravan, me and
Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the people we were with. Dravot
used to make us laugh in the evenings when all the people was cooking their
dinners--cooking their dinners, and . . . what did they do then? They lit
little fires with sparks that went into Dravot's beard, and we all laughed--
fit to die. Little red fires they was, going into Dravot's big red beard--so
funny." His eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly.
"You went as far as Jagdallak with that caravan," I said, at a venture, "after
you had lit those fires. To Jagdallak, where you turned off to try to get into
Kafiristan."
"No, we didn't, neither. What are you talking about? We turned off before
Jagdallak, because we heard the roads was good. But they wasn't good enough
for our two camels--mine and Dravot's. When we left the caravan, Dravot took
off all his clothes and mine too, and said we would be heathen, because the
Kafirs didn't allow Mohammedans to talk to them. So we dressed betwixt and
between, and such a sight as Daniel Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see
again. He burned half his beard, and slung a sheepskin over his shoulder, and
shaved his head into patterns. He shaved mine too, and made me wear outrageous
things to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountaineous country, and
our camels couldn't go along any more because of the mountains. They were tall
and black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild goats--there are lots of
goats in Kafiristan. And these mountains, they never keep still, no more than
the goats. Always fighting they are, and don't let you sleep at night."
"Take some more whisky," I said, very slowly. "What did you and Daniel Dravot
do when the camels could go no farther because of the rough roads that led
into Kafiristan?"
"What did which do? There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that
was with Dravot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the cold.
Slap from the bridge fell old Peachey, turning and twisting in the air like a
penny whirligig that you can sell to the Amir. No; they was two for three
ha'pence, those whirligigs, or I am much mistaken and woful sore... And then
these camels were no use, and Peachey said to Dravot, 'For the Lord's sake
let's get out of this before our heads are chopped off,' and with that they
killed the camels all among the mountains, not having anything in particular
to eat, but first they took off the boxes with the guns and the ammunition,
till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot up and dances in front of
them, singing, 'Sell me four mules.' Says the first man, 'If you are rich
enough to buy, you are rich enough to rob;' but before ever he could put his
hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck over his knee, and the other party
runs away. So Carnehan loaded the mules with the rifles that was taken off the
camels, and together we starts forward into those bitter-cold mountaineous
parts, and never a road broader than the back of your hand."
He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he could remember the nature of
the country through which he had journeyed.
"I am telling you as straight as I can, but my head isn't as good as it might
be. They drove nails through it to make me hear better how Dravot died. The
country was mountaineous and the mules were most contrary, and the inhabitants
was dispersed and solitary. They went up and up, and down and down, and that
other party, Carnehan, was imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle so
loud, for fear of bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that
if a King couldn't sing it wasn't worth being King, and whacked the mules over
the rump, and never took no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level
valley all among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, so we killed
them, not having anything in special for them or us to eat. We sat upon the
boxes, and played odd and even with the cartridges that was jolted out.
"Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing twenty men
with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus.
"They was fair men--fairer than you or me--with yellow hair and remarkable
well built. Says Dravot, unpacking the guns, 'This is the beginning of the
business. We'll fight for the ten men,' and with that he fires two rifles at
the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from the rock where
he was sitting. The other men began to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits on
the boxes picking them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. Then we goes
up to the ten men that had run across the snow too, and they fires a footy
little arrow at us. Dravot he shoots above their heads, and they all falls
down flat. Then he walks over them and kicks them, and then he lifts them up
and shakes hands all round to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives
them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the world as though he was
King already. They takes the boxes and him across the valley and up the hill
into a pine wood on the top, where there was half a dozen big stone idols.
Dravot he goes to the biggest--a fellow they call Imbra--and lays a rifle and
a cartridge at his feet, rubbing his nose respectfully with his own nose,
patting him on the head, and nods his head, and says, 'That's all right. I'm
in the know too, and these old jimjams are my friends.' Then he opens his
mouth and points down it, and when the first man brings him food, he says,
'No;' and when the second man brings him food, he says 'no;' but when one of
the old priests and the boss of the village brings him food, he says, 'Yes;'
very haughty, and eats it slow. That was how he came to our first village
without any trouble, just as though we had tumbled from the skies. But we
tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, you see, and--you couldn't
expect a man to laugh much after that?"
"Take some more whisky and go on," I said. "That was the first village you
came into. How did you get to be King?"
"I wasn't King," said Carnehan. "Dravot he was the King, and a handsome man he
looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him and the other party stayed
in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by the side of old Imbra, and
the people came and worshipped. That was Dravot's order. Then a lot of men
came into the valley, and Carnehan Dravot picks them off with the rifles
before they knew where they was, and runs down into the valley and up again
the other side, and finds another village, same as the first one, and the
people all falls down flat on their faces, and Dravot says, 'Now what is the
trouble between you two villages?' and the people points to a woman, as fair
as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back to the first
village and counts up the dead--eight there was. For each dead man Dravot
pours a little milk on the ground and waves his arms like a whirligig, and
'That's all right,' says he. Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each
village by the arm, and walks them down the valley, and shows them how to
scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod of
turf from both sides of the line. Then all the people comes down and shouts
like the devil and all, and Dravot says, 'Go and dig the land, and be fruitful
and multiply,' which they did, though they didn't understand. Then we asks the
names of things in their lingo--bread and water and fire and idols and such;
and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and says he must
sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes wrong he is to be shot.
"Next week they was all turning up the land in the valley as quiet as bees and
much prettier, and the priests heard all the complaints and told Dravot in
dumb-show what it was about. 'That's just the beginning,' says Dravot. 'They
think we're Gods.' He and Carnehan picks out twenty good men and shows them
how to click off a rifle and form fours and advance in line; and they was very
pleased to do so, and clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his pipe
and his baccy-pouch, and leaves one at one village and one at the other, and
off we two goes to see what was to be done in the next valley. That was all
rock, and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says, 'Send 'em to
the old valley to plant,' and takes 'em there and gives 'em some land that
wasn't took before. They were a poor lot, and we blooded 'em with a kid before
letting 'em into the new Kingdom. That was to impress the people, and then
they settled down quiet, and Carnehan went back to Dravot, who had got into
another valley, all snow and ice and most mountaineous.
"There was no people there, and the Army got afraid; so Dravot shoots one of
them, and goes on till he finds some people in a village, and the Army
explains that unless the people wants to be killed they had better not shoot
their little matchlocks, for they had matchlocks. We makes friends with the
priest, and I stays there alone with two of the Army, teaching the men how to
drill; and a thundering big Chief comes across the snow with kettledrums and
horns twanging, because he heard there was a new God kicking about. Carnehan
sights for the brown of the men half a mile across the snow and wings one of
them. Then he sends a message to the Chief that, unless he wished to be
killed, he must come and shake hands with me and leave his arms behind. The
Chief comes alone first, and Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls his
arms about, same as Dravot used, and very much surprised that Chief was, and
strokes my eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in
dumb-show if he had an enemy he hated. 'I have,' says the chief. So Carnehan
weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them
drill, and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as
Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a
mountain, and the Chief's men rushes into a village and takes it, we three
Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. So we took that village too, and
I gives the Chief a rag from my coat, and says, 'Occupy till I come;' which
was scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen
hundred yards away, I drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all
the people falls flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever
he be by land or by sea."
At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted: "How could
you write a letter up yonder?"
"The letter?--oh!--the letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes, please. It
was a string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of it from a blind beggar
in the Punjab."
I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with a knotted
twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some
cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the
sentence which he had reeled up.
He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me
his method, but I could not understand.
"I sent that letter to Dravot," said Carnehan, "and told him to come back
because this Kingdom was growing too big for me to handle; and then I struck
for the first valley, to see how the priests were working. They called the
village we took along with the Chief, Bashkai, and the first village we took,
Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb was doing all right, but they had a lot of
pending cases about land to show me, and some men from another village had
been firing arrows at night. I went out and looked for that village, and fired
four rounds at it from a thousand yards. That used all the cartridges I cared
to spend, and I waited for Dravot, who had been away two or three months, and
I kept my people quiet.
"One morning I heard the devil's own noise of drums and horns, and Dan Dravot
marches down the hill with his Army and a tail of hundreds of men, and, which
was the most amazing, a great gold crown on his head. 'My Gord, Carnehan,'
says Daniel, 'this is a tremenjus business, and we've got the whole country as
far as it's worth having. I am the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis, and
you're my younger brother and a God too! It's the biggest thing we've ever
seen. I've been marching and fighting for six weeks with the Army, and every
footy little village for fifty miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than
that, I've got the key of the whole show, as you'll see, and I've got a crown
for you! I told 'em to make two of 'em at a place called Shu, where the gold
lies in the rock like suet in mutton. Gold I've seen, and turquoise I've
kicked out of the cliffs, and there's garnets in the sands of the river, and
here's a chunk of amber that a man brought me. Call up all the priests and,
here, take your crown.'
"One of the men opens a black hair bag, and I slips the crown on. It was too
small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was--five
pounds weight, like a hoop of a barrel.
"'Peachey,' says Dravot, 'we don't want to fight no more. The Craft's the
trick, so help me!' and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at
Bashkai--Billy Fish we called him afterward, because he was so like Billy Fish
that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. 'Shake
hands with him,' says Dravot; and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy
Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow-craft
Grip. He answers all right, and I tried the Master's Grip, but that was a
slip. 'A Fellow-craft he is!' I says to Dan. 'Does he know the word?' 'He
does,' says Dan, 'and all the priests know. It's a miracle! The Chiefs and the
priests can work a Fellow-craft Lodge in a way that's very like ours, and
they've cut the marks on the rocks, but they don't know the Third Degree, and
they've come to find out. It's Gord's Truth. I've known these long years that
the Afghans knew up to the Fellow-craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A God
and a Grand Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will
open, and we'll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.'
"'It's against all the law,' I says, 'holding a Lodge without warrant from any
one; and you know we never held office in any Lodge.'
"'It's a master stroke o' policy,' says Dravot. 'It means running the country
as easy as a four-wheeled bogie on a down grade. We can't stop to inquire now,
or they'll turn against us. I've forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and
raised according to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on the
villages, and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra
will do for a Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as you show them. I'll
hold a levee of Chiefs tonight and Lodge tomorrow.'
"I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn't such a fool as not to see what a
pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests' families how to make
aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot's apron the blue border and marks was
made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone
in the temple for the Master's chair, and little stones for the officer's
chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we
could to make things regular.
"At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires,
Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Passed
Grand Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where
every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then
the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and
fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according
as they was like men we had known in India--Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky
Kergan, that was Bazaar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
"The most amazing miracles was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests
was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we'd have to fudge
the Ritual, and I didn't know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger
come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the
Master's apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and
a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. 'It's all
up now,' I says. 'That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!'
Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the
Grand Master's chair--which was to say, the stone of Imbra. The priest begins
rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he
shows all the other priests the Master's Mark, same as was on Dravot's apron,
cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was
there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot's feet and kisses 'em.
'Luck again,' says Dravot, across the Lodge, to me; 'they say it's the missing
Mark that no one could understand the why of.
We're more than safe now.' Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and
says, 'By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the
help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand Master of all Freemasonry in
Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o' the country, and King of Kafiristan
equally with Peachey!' At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine,--I was
doing Senior Warden,--and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was an
amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees
almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that
Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy--high priests and Chiefs of far-
off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul
out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn.
We didn't raise more than ten of the biggest men, because we didn't want to
make the Degree common. And they was clamouring to be raised.
"'In another six months,' says Dravot, 'we'll hold another Communication and
see how you are working.' Then he asks them about their villages, and learns
that they was fighting one against the other, and were sick and tired of it.
And when they wasn't doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. 'You
can fight those when they come into our country,' says Dravot. 'Tell off every
tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time
to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more
so long as he does well, and I know that you won't cheat me, because you're
white people--sons of Alexander--and not like common black Mohammedans. You
are my people, and, by God,' says he, running off into English at the end,
'I'll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I'll die in the making!'
"I can't tell all we did for the next six months, because Dravot did a lot I
couldn't see the hang of, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could.
My work was to help the people plough, and now and again go out with some of
the Army and see what the other villages were doing, and make 'em throw rope
bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very
kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that
bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I could
not advise about, and I just waited for orders.
"But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the people. They were afraid of
me and the Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of friends with the
priests and the Chiefs; but any one could come across the hills with a
complaint, and Dravot would hear him out fair, and call four priests together
and say what was to be done.
"He used to call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an
old Chief we called Kafuzelum,--it was like enough to his real name,--and hold
councils with 'em when there was any fighting to be done in small villages.
That was his Council of War, and the four priests of Bashkai, Shu, Khawak, and
Madora was his Privy Council. Between the lot of 'em they sent me, with forty
men and twenty rifles, and sixty men carrying turquoises, into the Ghorband
country to buy those hand-made Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir's
workshops at Kabul, from one of the Amir's Herati regiments that would have
sold the very teeth out of their mouths for turquoises.
"I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of my
baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some more, and,
between the two and the tribes-people, we got more than a hundred hand-made
Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that'll throw to six hundred yards, and
forty man--loads of very bad ammunition for the rifles. I came back with what
I had, and distributed 'em among the men that the Chiefs sent in to me to
drill. Dravot was too busy to attend to those things, but the old Army that we
first made helped me, and we turned out five hundred men that could drill, and
two hundred that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those cork-
screwed, hand-made guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder-
shops and factories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the winter was
coming on.
"'I won't make a Nation,' says he. 'I'll make an Empire! These men aren't
niggers; they're English! Look at their eyes--look at their mouths. Look at
the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They're the
Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they've grown to be English. I'll take
a census in the spring if the priests don't get frightened. There must be a
fair two million of 'em in these hills. The villages are full o' little
children. Two million people--two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men--and
all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and
fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia's right flank when she tries for
India! Peachey, man,' he says, chewing his beard in great hunks, 'we shall be
Emperors--Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suckling to us. I'll
treat with the Viceroy on equal terms. I'll ask him to send me twelve picked
English--twelve that I know of--to help us govern a bit. There's Mackray,
Serjeant Pensioner at Segowli--many's the good dinner he's given me, and his
wife a pair of trousers. There's Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail; there's
hundreds that I could lay my hand on if I was in India. The Viceroy shall do
it for me; I'll send a man through in the spring for those men, and I'll write
for a dispensation from the Grand Lodge for what I've done as Grand Master.
That--and all the Sniders that'll be thrown out when the native troops in
India take up the Martini. They'll be worn smooth, but they'll do for fighting
in these hills. Twelve English, a hundred thousand Sniders run through the
Amir's country in driblets,--I'd be content with twenty thousand in one year,-
-and we'd be an Empire.
"When everything was shipshape I'd hand over the crown--this crown I'm wearing
now--to Queen Victoria on my knees, and she'd say, "Rise up, Sir Daniel
Dravot." Oh, it's big! It's big, I tell you! But there's so much to be done in
every place--Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and everywhere else.'
"'What is it?' I says. 'There are no more men coming in to be drilled this
autumn. Look at those fat black clouds. They're bringing the snow.'
"'It isn't that,' says Daniel, putting his hand very hard on my shoulder; 'and
I don't wish to say anything that's against you, for no other living man would
have followed me and made me what I am as you have done. You're a first-class
Commander-in-Chief, and the people know you; but--it's a big country, and
somehow you can't help me, Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.'
"'Go to your blasted priests, then!' I said, and I was sorry when I made that
remark, but it did hurt me sore to find Daniel talking so superior, when I'd
drilled all the men and done all he told me.
"'Don't let's quarrel, Peachey,' says Daniel, without cursing. 'You're a King
too, and the half of this Kingdom is yours; but can't you see, Peachey, we
want cleverer men than us now--three or four of 'em, that we can scatter about
for our Deputies. It's a hugeous great State, and I can't always tell the
right thing to do, and I haven't time for all I want to do, and here's the
winter coming on and all.'
"He put half his beard into his mouth, all red like the gold of his crown.
"'I'm sorry, Daniel,' says I. 'I've done all I could. I've drilled the men and
shown the people how to stack their oats better; and I've brought in those
tinware rifles from Ghorband--but I know what you're driving at. I take it
Kings always feel oppressed that way.'
"'There's another thing too,' says Dravot, walking up and down. 'The winter's
coming, and these people won't be giving much trouble, and if they do we can't
move about. I want a wife.'
"'For Gord's sake leave the women alone!' I says. 'We've both got all the work
we can, though I am a fool. Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o' women.'"
"'The Contrack only lasted till such time as we was Kings; and Kings we have
been these months past,' says Dravot, weighing his crown in his hand. 'You go
get a wife too, Peachey--a nice, strappin', plump girl that'll keep you warm
in the winter. They're prettier than English girls, and we can take the pick
of 'em. Boil 'em once or twice in hot water, and they'll come out like chicken
and ham.'
"'Don't tempt me!' I says. 'I will not have any dealings with a woman, not
till we are a dam' side more settled than we are now. I've been doing the work
o' two men, and you've been doing the work of three. Let's lie off a bit, and
see if we can get some better tobacco from Afghan country and run in some good
liquor; and no women.'"
"'Who's talking o' women?' says Dravot. 'I said wife--a Queen to breed a
King's son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that'll make them
your blood-brothers, and that'll lie by your side and tell you all the people
thinks about you and their own affairs. That's what I want.'
"'Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-
layer?' says I. 'A fat lot o' good she was to me. She taught me the lingo and
one or two other things; but what happened? She ran away with the Station-
master's servant and half my month's pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junction
in tow of a half-caste, and had the impidence to say I was her husband--all
among the drivers in the running-shed too!'
"'We've done with that,' says Dravot; 'these women are whiter than you or me,
and a Queen I will have for the winter months.'
"'For the last time o' asking, Dan, do not,' I says. 'It'll only bring us
harm. The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on women,
'specially when they've got a new raw Kingdom to work over.'
"'For the last time of answering, I will,' said Dravot, and he went away
through the pine trees looking like a big red devil, the sun being on his
crown and beard and all.
"But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before the
Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he'd better ask the
girls. Dravot damned them all round.
"'What's wrong with me?' he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. 'Am I a dog,
or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven't I put the shadow of my
hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?' It was me really,
but Dravot was too angry to remember. 'Who bought your guns? Who repaired the
bridges? Who's the Grand Master of the sign cut in the stone?' says he, and he
thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council,
which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing, and no more did the
others. 'Keep your hair on, Dan,' said I, 'and ask the girls. That's how it's
done at Home, and these people are quite English.'
"'The marriage of the King is a matter of State,' says Dan, in a white-hot
rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He
walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, looking at the
ground.
"'Billy Fish,' says I to the Chief of Bashkai, 'what's the difficulty here? A
straight answer to a true friend.'
"'You know,' says Billy Fish. 'How should a man tell you who knows everything?
How can daughters of men marry Gods or Devils? It's not proper.'
"I remembered something like that in the Bible; but, if after seeing us as
long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn't for me to
undeceive them.
"'A God can do anything,' says I. 'If the King is fond of a girl he'll not let
her die.' 'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are all sorts of Gods and
Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and
isn't seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the
Gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the
Master.'
"I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of
a Master Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there
was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I
heard the girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was
being prepared to marry the King.
"'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says Dan. 'I don't want to interfere
with your customs, but I'll take my own wife.' 'The girl's a little bit
afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks she's going to die, and they are a-
heartening of her up down in the temple.'
"'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dravot, 'or I'll hearten you with the
butt of a gun so you'll never want to be heartened again.'
"He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half the
night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the morning. I wasn't
any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with a woman in foreign parts,
though you was a crowned King twenty times over, could not but be risky. I got
up very early in the morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests
talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they
looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.
"'What is up, Fish?' I say to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in his furs
and looking splendid to behold.
"'I can't rightly say,' says he; 'but if you can make the King drop all this
nonsense about marriage, you'll be doing him and me and yourself a great
service.'
"'That I do believe,' says I. 'But sure, you know, Billy, as well as me,
having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing more than
two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing more, I do assure
you.'
"'That may be,' says Billy Fish, 'and yet I should be sorry if it was.' He
sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks. 'King,' says
he, 'be you man or God or Devil, I'll stick by you today. I have twenty of my
men with me, and they will follow me. We'll go to Bashkai until the storm
blows over.'
"A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white except the
greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north. Dravot came out with
his crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping his feet, and looking
more pleased than Punch.
"'For the last time, drop it, Dan,' says I, in a whisper; 'Billy Fish here
says that there will be a row.'
"'A row among my people!' says Dravot. 'Not much. Peachey, you're a fool not
to get a wife too. Where's the girl?' says he, with a voice as loud as the
braying of a jackass. 'Call up all the Chiefs and priests, and let the Emperor
see if his wife suits him.'
"There was no need to call any one. They were all there leaning on their guns
and spears round the clearing in the centre of the pine wood. A lot of priests
went down to the little temple to bring up the girl, and the horns blew fit to
wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as he
could, and behind him stood his twenty men with matchlocks--not a man of them
under six feet. I was next to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the
regular Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with
silver and turquoises, but white as death, and looking back every minute at
the priests.
"'She'll do,' said Dan, looking her over. 'What's to be afraid of, lass? Come
and kiss me.' He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a
squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan's flaming-red beard.
"'The slut's bitten me!' says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and, sure
enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his matchlock men
catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into the Bashkai lot, while
the priests howls in their lingo, 'Neither God nor Devil, but a man!' I was
all taken aback, for a priest cut at me in front, and the Army behind began
firing into the Bashkai men.
"'God A'mighty!' says Dan, 'what is the meaning o' this?'
"'Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 'Ruin and Mutiny is the matter.
We'll break for Bashkai if we can.'
"I tried to give some sort of orders to my men,--the men o' the regular Army,-
-but it was no use, so I fired into the brown of 'em with an English Martini
and drilled three beggars in a line. The valley was full of shouting, howling
creatures, and every soul was shrieking, 'Not a God nor a Devil, but only a
man!' The Bashkai troops stuck to Billy Fish all they were worth, but their
matchlocks wasn't half as good as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them
dropped. Dan was bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish
had a hard job to prevent him running out at the crowd.
"'We can't stand,' says Billy Fish. 'Make a run for it down the valley! The
whole place is against us.' The matchlock-men ran, and we went down the valley
in spite of Dravot. He was swearing horrible and crying out that he was a
King. The priests rolled great stones on us, and the regular Army fired hard,
and there wasn't more than six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that
came down to the bottom of the valley alive.
"Then they stopped firing, and the horns in the temple blew again.
"'Come away--for Gord's sake come away!' says Billy Fish. 'They'll send
runners out to all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can protect
you there, but I can't do anything now."
"My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour. He
stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for walking back alone
and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he could have done. 'An
Emperor am I,' says Daniel, 'and next year I shall be a Knight of the Queen.'
"'All right, Dan,' says I; 'but come along now while there's time.'
"'It's your fault,' says he, 'for not looking after your Army better. There
was mutiny in the midst, and you didn't know--you damned engine-driving,
plate-laying, missionary's-pass-hunting hound!' He sat upon a rock and called
me every foul name he could lay tongue to. I was too heart-sick to care,
though it was all his foolishness that brought the smash.
"'I'm sorry, Dan,' says I, 'but there's no accounting for natives. This
business is our Fifty-seven. Maybe we'll make something out of it yet, when
we've got to Bashkai.'
"'Let's get to Bashkai, then,' says Dan, 'and, by God, when I come back here
again I'll sweep the valley so there isn't a bug in a blanket left!'
"We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was stumping up and down on
the snow, chewing his beard and muttering to himself.
"'There's no hope o' getting clear,' said Billy Fish. 'The priests have sent
runners to the villages to say that you are only men. Why didn't you stick on
as Gods till things was more settled? I'm a dead man,' says Billy Fish, and he
throws himself down on the snow and begins to pray to his Gods.
"Next morning we was in a cruel bad country--all up and down, no level ground
at all, and no food, either. The six Bashkai men looked at Billy Fish hungry-
way as if they wanted to ask something, but they never said a word. At noon we
came to the top of a flat mountain all covered with snow, and when we climbed
up into it, behold, there was an Army in position waiting in the middle!
"'The runners have been very quick,' says Billy Fish, with a little bit of a
laugh. 'They are waiting for us.'
"Three or four men began to fire from the enemy's side, and a chance shot took
Daniel in the calf of the leg. That brought him to his senses. He looks across
the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that we had brought into the
country.
"'We're done for,' says he. 'They are Englishmen, these people,--and it's my
blasted nonsense that has brought you to this. Get back, Billy Fish, and take
your men away; you've done what you could, and now cut for it. Carnehan,' says
he, 'shake hands with me and go along with Billy, Maybe they won't kill you.
I'll go and meet 'em alone. It's me that did it! Me, the King!'
"'Go!' says I. 'Go to Hell, Dan! I'm with you here. Billy Fish, you clear out,
and we two will meet those folk.'
"'I'm a Chief,' says Billy Fish, quite quiet. 'I stay with you. My men can
go.'
"The Bashkai fellows didn't wait for a second word, but ran off, and Dan and
Me and Billy Fish walked across to where the drums were drumming and the horns
were horning. It was cold--awful cold. I've got that cold in the back of my
head now. There's a lump of it there."
The punka-coolies had gone to sleep. Two kerosene lamps were blazing in the
office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed on the blotter
as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his mind might
go. I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and
said, "What happened after that?"
The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.
"What was you pleased to say?" whined Carnehan. "They took them without any
sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King knocked
down the first man that set hand on him--not though old Peachey fired his last
cartridge into the brown of 'em. Not a single solitary sound did those swines
make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a
man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir,
then and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says,
'We've had a dashed fine run for our money. What's coming next?' But Peachey,
Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he
lost his head, Sir. No, he didn't, neither. The King lost his head, so he did,
all along o' one of those cunning rope bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-
cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. They marched him a mile across that snow to a
rope bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such.
They prodded him behind like an ox. 'Damn your eyes!' says the King. 'D' you
suppose I can't die like a gentleman?'
"He turns to Peachey--Peachey that was crying like a child. 'I've brought you
to this, Peachey,' says he. 'Brought you out of your happy life to be killed
in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor's forces.
Say you forgive me, Peachey.' 'I do,' says Peachey. 'Fully and freely do I
forgive you, Dan.' 'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm going now.' Out he
goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of
those dizzy dancing ropes, 'Cut you beggars,' he shouts; and they cut, and old
Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he
took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body
caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.
"But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine trees? They
crucified him, Sir, as Peachey's hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his
hands and feet; but he didn't die. He hung there and screamed, and they took
him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn't dead. They took
him down--poor old Peachey that hadn't done them any harm--that hadn't done
them any--"
He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his
scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.
"They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said he was
more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned him out on the
snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in about a year, begging
along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said, 'Come
along, Peachey. It's a big thing we're doing.' The mountains they danced at
night, and the mountains they tried to fall on Peachey's head, but Dan he held
up his hand, and Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan's
hand, and he never let go of Dan's head. They gave it to him as a present in
the temple, to remind him not to come again; and though the crown was pure
gold and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You know
Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him now!"
He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black
horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread; and shook therefrom on to my
table--the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun, that had
long been paling the lamps, struck the red beard and blind sunken eyes;
struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that
Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered temples.
"You be'old now," said Carnehan, "the Emperor in his 'abit as he lived--the
King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a
monarch once!"
I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, I recognised the head of
the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop him. He
was not fit to walk abroad. "Let me take away the whisky, and give me a little
money," he gasped. "I was a King once. I'll go to the Deputy Commissioner and
ask to set in the Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I can't wait
till you get a carriage for me. I've urgent private affairs--in the south--at
Marwar."
He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the Deputy
Commissioner's house. That day at noon I had occasion to go down the blinding-
hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the white dust of the
roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously after the fashion of
street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in sight, and he was out of all
possible earshot of the houses. And he sang through his nose, turning his head
from right to left:
"The Son of Man goes forth to war,
A golden crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar--
Who follows in His train?"
I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and drove
him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum. He
repeated the hymn twice while he was with me, whom he did not in the least
recognise, and I left him singing it to the missionary.
Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the
Asylum.
"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He died early yesterday morning,"
said the Superintendent. "Is it true that he was half an hour bareheaded in
the sun at midday?"
"Yes," said I; "but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by any
chance when he died?"
"Not to my knowledge," said the Superintendent.
And there the matter rests.
* * * * * * * *
"THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD"
"O' ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave."
--W. E. Henley.
His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow,
and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in
a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I met him in a
public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given name, and he
called the marker "Bulls-eyes." Charley explained, a little nervously, that he
had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill
is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go
back to his mother.
That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me
sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow-
clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me
of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an
undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories of
love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit
still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments
of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved
confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man are almost as
holy as those of a maiden.
Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first
opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honorable, but, at
the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way about
the world as befitted a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed
"dove" with "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly believed that they had
never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays he filled up with
hasty words of apology and description and swept on, seeing all that he
intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already done, and turned to me
for applause.
I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations, and I know that his
writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he told me almost at
the outset of our acquaintance; when he was ravaging my bookshelves, and a
little before I was implored to speak the truth as to his chances of "writing
something really great, you know." Maybe I encouraged him too much, for, one
night, he called on me, his eyes flaming with excitement, and said
breathlessly:
"Do you mind--can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won't
interrupt you, I won't really. There's no place for me to write in at my
mother's."
"What's the trouble?" I said, knowing well what that trouble was.
"I've a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was
ever written. Do let me write it out here. It's such a notion!"
There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked me,
but plunged into the work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched without
stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching grew slower,
there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in the world
would not come forth.
"It looks such awful rot now" he said, mournfully. "And yet it seemed so good
when I was thinking about it. What's wrong?"
I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: "Perhaps you
don't feel in the mood for writing."
"Yes I do--except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!"
"Read me what you've done," I said. He read, and it was wondrous bad and he
paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for
he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.
"It needs compression," I suggested, cautiously.
"I hate cutting my things down. I don't think you could alter a word here
without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing it."
"Charlie, you're suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous
class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week."
"I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?"
"How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in
your head."
Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had
so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him,
and wondering whether it were possible, that he did not know the originality,
the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was distinctly a Notion
among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by notions not a tithe as
excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the
current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to
use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain
in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be
done indeed; but, oh so much!
"What do you think?" he said, at last. "I fancy I shall call it 'The Story of
a Ship.'"
"I think the idea's pretty good; but you won't he able to handle it for ever
so long. Now I--"
"Would it be of any use to you? Would you care to take it? I should be proud,"
said Charlie, promptly.
There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hot-headed,
intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in her blindest
devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she adores, tilt her bonnet to
the angle at which he wears his hat, or interlard her speech with his pet
oaths. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was necessary to salve my
conscience before I possessed myself of Charlie's thoughts.
"Let's make a bargain. I'll give you a fiver for the notion," I said.
Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.
"Oh, that's impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you so, and
speaking as a man of the world, I couldn't. Take the notion if it's any use to
you. I've heaps more."
He had--none knew this better than I--but they were the notions of other men.
"Look at it as a matter of business--between men of the world," I returned.
"Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books. Business is business,
and you may be sure I shouldn't give that price unless--"
"Oh, if you put it that way," said Charlie, visibly moved by the thought of
the books. The bargain was clinched with an agreement that he should at
unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he possessed, should
have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned right to inflict upon me
all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, "Now tell me how you came
by this idea."
"It came by itself." Charlie's eyes opened a little.
"Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have read
before somewhere."
"I haven't any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and on
Sundays I'm on my bicycle or down the river all day. There's nothing wrong
about the hero, is there?"
"Tell me again and I shall understand clearly. You say that your hero went
pirating. How did he live?"
"He was on the lower deck of this ship-thing that I was telling you about."
"What sort of ship?"
"It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea spurts through the oar-holes and
the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then there's a bench running
down between the two lines of oars and an overseer with a whip walks up and
down the bench to make the men work."
"How do you know that?"
"It's in the table. There's a rope running overhead, looped to the upper deck,
for the overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. When the overseer
misses the rope once and falls among the rowers, remember the hero laughs at
him and gets licked for it. He's chained to his oar of course--the hero."
"How is he chained?"
"With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a sort
of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He's on the lower deck
where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and
through the oar-holes. Can't you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through
between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as the ship moves?"
"I can, but I can't imagine your imagining it."
"How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on the
upper deck are managed by four men to each bench, the lower ones by three, and
the lowest of all by two. Remember it's quite dark on the lowest deck and all
the men there go mad. When a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn't thrown
overboard, but cut up in his chains and stuffed through the oar-hole in little
pieces."
"Why?" I demanded, amazed, not so much at the information as the tone of
command in which it was flung out.
"To save trouble and to frighten the others. It needs two overseers to drag a
man's body up to the top deck; and if the men at the lower deck oars were left
alone, of course they'd stop rowing and try to pull up the benches by all
standing up together in their chains."
"You've a most provident imagination. Where have you been reading about
galleys and galley-slaves?"
"Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But, perhaps,
if you say so, I may have read something."
He went away shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a
bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate abundance of
detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and
bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led
his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the overseas, to command of
a ship of his own, and ultimate establishment of a kingdom on an island
"somewhere in the sea, you know"; and, delighted with my paltry five pounds,
had gone out to buy the notions of other men, that these might teach him how
to write. I had the consolation of knowing that this notion was mine by right
of purchase, and I thought that I could make something of it.
When next he came to me he was drunk--royally drunk on many poets for the
first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over
each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations. Most of all was he drunk
with Longfellow.
"Isn't it splendid? Isn't it superb?" he cried, after hasty greetings.
"Listen to this--
"'Wouldst thou,' so the helmsman answered,
'Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.'
"By gum!
"'Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery.'" he repeated
twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting me. "But I can
understand it too," he said to himself. "I don't know how to thank you for
that fiver. And this; listen--
"'I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.'
"I haven't braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it."
"You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen it?"
"When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live in
Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,
"'When descends on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the Equinox.'"
He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion that was shaking
himself.
"When that storm comes," he continued, "I think that all the oars in the ship
that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their chests smashed
in by the bucking oar-heads. By the way, have you done anything with that
notion of mine yet?"
"No. I was waiting to hear more of it from you. Tell me how in the world
you're so certain about the fittings of the ship. You know nothing of ships."
"I don't know. It's as real as anything to me until I try to write it down. I
was thinking about it only last night in bed, after you had loaned me
'Treasure Island'; and I made up a whole lot of new things to go into the
story."
"What sort of things?"
"About the food the men ate; rotten figs and black beans and wine in a skin
bag, passed from bench to bench."
"Was the ship built so long ago as that?"
"As what? I don't know whether it was long ago or not. It's only a notion, but
sometimes it seems just as real as if it was true. Do I bother you with
talking about it?"
"Not in the least. Did you make up anything else?"
"Yes, but it's nonsense." Charlie flushed a little.
"Never mind; let's hear about it."
"Well, I was thinking over the story, and after awhile I got out of bed and
wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men might be supposed to
scratch on their oars with the edges of their handcuffs. It seemed to make the
thing more lifelike. It is so real to me, y'know."
"Have you the paper on you?"
"Ye-es, but what's the use of showing it? It's only a lot of scratches. All
the same, we might have 'em reproduced in the book on the front page."
"I'll attend to those details. Show me what your men wrote."
He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of note-paper, with a single line of
scratches upon it, and I put this carefully away.
"What is it supposed to mean in English?" I said.
"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it means 'I'm beastly tired.' It's great nonsense,"
he repeated, "but all those men in the ship seem as real people to me. Do do
something to the notion soon; I should like to see it written and printed."
"But all you've told me would make a long book."
"Make it then. You've only to sit down and write it out."
"Give me a little time. Have you any more notions?"
"Not just now. I'm reading all the books I've bought. They're splendid."
When he had left I looked at the sheet of note-paper with the inscription upon
it. Then I took my head tenderly between both hands, to make certain that it
was not coming off or turning round.
Then--but there seemed to be no interval between quitting my rooms and finding
myself arguing with a policeman outside a door marked Private in a corridor of
the British Museum. All I demanded, as politely as possible, was "the Greek
antiquity man." The policeman knew nothing except the rules of the Museum, and
it became necessary to forage through all the houses and offices inside the
gates. An elderly gentleman called away from his lunch put an end to my search
by holding the note-paper between finger and thumb and sniffing at it
scornfully.
"What does this mean? H'mm," said he. "So far as I can ascertain it is an
attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part"--here he glared at me
with intention--"of an extremely illiterate--ah--person." He read slowly from
the paper, "Pollock, Erckman, Tauchnitz, Henniker"--four names familiar to me.
"Can you tell me what the corruption is supposed to mean--the gist of the
thing?" I asked.
"'I have been--many times--overcome with weariness in this particular
employment. That is the meaning.'" He returned me the paper, and I fled
without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.
I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men had been given
the chance to write the most marvelous tale in the world, nothing less than
the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told by himself. Small wonder that his
dreaming had seemed real to Charlie. The Fates that are so careful to shut the
doors of each successive life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful,
and Charlie was looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been
permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was
absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would
retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a
sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply me--here I
capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered faces--with
material to make my tale sure--so sure that the world would hail it as an
impudent and vamped fiction. And I--I alone would know that it was absolutely
and literally true. I alone held this jewel to my hand for the cutting and
polishing.
Therefore I danced again among the gods till a policeman saw me and took steps
in my direction.
It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was no
difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He came to me
time after time, as useless as a surcharged phonograph--drunk on Byron,
Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy had been in his past lives, and
desperately anxious not to lose one word of his babble, I could not hide from
him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present
soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest
in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting
poetry--not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English poet
blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song
because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct narrative, and would,
later, spur him to imitate them; but I choked down my impatience until the
first flood of enthusiasm should have spent itself and the boy returned to his
dreams.
"What's the use of my telling you what I think, when these chaps wrote things
for the angels to read?" he growled, one evening. "Why don't you write
something like theirs?"
"I don't think you're treating me quite fairly," I said, speaking under strong
restraint.
"I've given you the story," he said, shortly replunging into "Lara."
"But I want the details."
"The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley? They're
quite easy. You can just make 'em up yourself. Turn up the gas a little, I
want to go on reading."
I could have broken the gas globe over his head for his amazing stupidity. I
could indeed make up things for myself did I only know what Charlie did not
know that he knew. But since the doors were shut behind me I could only wait
his youthful pleasure and strive to keep him in good temper. One minute's want
of guard might spoil a priceless revelation: now and again he would toss his
books aside--he kept them in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked
at the waste of good money had she seen them--and launched into his sea
dreams. Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-
clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and
the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the
muttered song through a City telephone in the busiest part of the day.
He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the "Bride of Abydos." He pointed the experiences
of his hero with quotations from "The Corsair," and threw in deep and
desperate moral reflections from "Cain" and "Manfred," expecting me to use
them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow were the jarring cross-
currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was speaking the truth as he remembered
it.
"What do you think of this?" I said one evening, as soon as I understood the
medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could expostulate read
him the whole of "The Saga of King Olaf!"
He listened open-mouthed, flushed his hands drumming on the back of the sofa
where he lay, till I came to the Songs of Emar Tamberskelver and the verse:
"Emar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered: 'That was Norway breaking
'Neath thy hand, O King.'"
He gasped with pure delight of sound.
"That's better than Byron, a little," I ventured.
"Better? Why it's true! How could he have known?"
I went back and repeated:
"'What was that?' said Olaf, standing
On the quarter-deck,
'Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck.'"
"How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go z-zzp
all along the line? Why only the other night--But go back please and read 'The
Skerry of Shrieks' again."
"No, I'm tired. Let's talk. What happened the other night?"
"I had an awful nightmare about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was drowned
in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in harbor. The water was
dead still except where our oars whipped it up. You know where I always sit in
the galley?" He spoke haltingly at first, under a fine English fear of being
laughed at.
"No. That's news to me," I answered, meekly, my heart beginning to beat.
"On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper deck. There
were four of us at the oar, all chained. I remember watching the water and
trying to get my handcuffs off before the row began. Then we closed up on the
other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our bulwarks, and my bench
broke and I was pinned down with the three other fellows on top of me, and the
big oar jammed across our backs."
"Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall
behind my chair.
"I don't know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and I
lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars, you know--began
to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we spun round like
a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up
bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her
sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late.
We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked
herself on to us and stopped our moving. Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our
left oars began to break as the other galley, the moving one y'know, stuck her
nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck-planking,
butt first, and one of them jumped clean up into the air and came down again
close to my head."
"How was that managed?"
"The moving galley's bow was plunking them back through their own oarholes,
and I could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks below. Then her nose
caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways, and the fellows in the
right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and ropes, and threw things on to our
upper deck--arrows, and hot pitch or something that stung, and we went up and
up and up on the left side, and the right side dipped, and I twisted my head
round and saw the water stand still as it topped the right bulwarks, and then
it curled over and crashed down on the whole lot of us on the right side, and
I felt it hit my back, and I woke."
"One minute, Charlie. When the sea topped the bulwarks, what did it look
like?" I had my reasons for asking. A man of my acquaintance had once gone
down with a leaking ship in a still sea, and had seen the water-level pause
for an instant ere it fell on the deck.
"It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay there
for years," said Charlie.
Exactly! The other man had said: "It looked like a silver wire laid down along
the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break." He had paid
everything except the bare life for this little valueless piece of knowledge,
and I had traveled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and take his knowledge
at second hand. But Charlie, the bank-clerk, on twenty-five shillings a week,
he who had never been out of sight of a London omnibus, knew it all. It was no
consolation to me that once in his lives he had been forced to die for his
gains. I also must have died scores of times, but behind me, because I could
have used my knowledge, the doors were shut.
"And then?" I said, trying to put away the devil of envy.
"The funny thing was, though, in all the mess I didn't feel a bit astonished
or frightened. It seemed as if I'd been in a good many fights, because I told
my next man so when the row began. But that cad of an overseer on my deck
wouldn't unloose our chains and give us a chance. He always said that we'd all
he set free after a battle, but we never were; We never were." Charlie shook
his head mournfully.
"What a scoundrel!"
"I should say he was. He never gave us enough to eat, and sometimes we were so
thirsty that we used to drink salt-water. I can taste that salt-water still.''
"Now tell me something about the harbor where the fight was fought."
"I didn't dream about that. I know it was a harbor, though; because we were
tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the stone under water
was covered with wood to prevent our ram getting chipped when the tide made us
rock."
"That's curious. Our hero commanded the galley? Didn't he?"
"Didn't he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good 'un. He was the
man who killed the overseer."
"But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren't you?"
"I can't make that fit quite," he said with a puzzled look. "The galley must
have gone down with all hands and yet I fancy that the hero went on living
afterward. Perhaps he climbed into the attacking ship. I wouldn't see that, of
course. I was dead, you know."
He shivered slightly and protested that he could remember no more.
I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance of
the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to Mortimer
Collins's "Transmigration," and gave him a sketch of the plot before he opened
the pages.
"What rot it all is!" he said, frankly, at the end of an hour. "I don't
understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King, and the rest
of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again."
I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember of his
description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to time for
confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without raising his eyes from
the book, as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay before flint on the
printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my voice that the current might
not be broken, and I know that he was not aware of what he was saying, for his
thoughts were out on the sea with Longfellow.
"Charlie," I asked, "when the rowers on the galleys mutinied how did they kill
their overseers?"
"Tore up the benches and brained 'em. That happened when a heavy sea was
running. An overseer on the lower deck slipped from the centre plank and fell
among the rowers. They choked him to death against the side of the ship with
their chained hands quite quietly, and it was too dark for the other overseer
to see what had happened. When he asked, he was pulled down too and choked,
and the lower deck fought their way up deck by deck, with the pieces of the
broken benches banging behind 'em. How they howled!"
"And what happened after that?"
"I don't know. The hero went away--red hair and red beard and all. That was
after he had captured our galley, I think"
The sound of my voice irritated him, and he motioned slightly with his left
hand as a man does when interruption jars.
"You never told me he was redheaded before, or that he captured your galley,"
I said, after a discreet interval.
Charlie did not raise his eyes.
"He was as red as a red bear," said he, abstractedly. "He came from the north;
they said so in the galley when he looked for rowers--not slaves, but free
men. Afterward--years and years afterward--news came from another ship, or
else he came back"--His lips moved in silence. He was rapturously retasting
some poem before him.
"Where had he been, then?" I was almost whispering that the sentence might
come gentle to whichever section of Charlie's brain was working on my behalf.
"To the Beaches--the Long and Wonderful Beaches!" was the reply, after a
minute of silence.
"To Furdurstrandi?" I asked, tingling from head to foot.
"Yes, to Furdurstrandi," he pronounced the word in a new fashion "And I too
saw"--The voice failed.
"Do you know what you have said?" I shouted, incautiously.
He lifted his eyes, fully roused now. "No!" he snapped. "I wish you'd let a
chap go on reading. Hark to this:
"'But Othere, the old sea captain,
He neither paused nor stirred
Till the king listened, and then
Once more took up his pen
And wrote down every word.
"'And to the King of the Saxons
In witness of the truth,
Raising his noble head,
He stretched his brown hand and said,
"Behold this walrus tooth."
"By Jove, what chaps those must have been, to go sailing all over the shop
never knowing where they'd fetch the land! Hah!"
"Charlie," I pleaded, "if you'll only be sensible for a minute or two I'll
make our hero in our tale every inch as good as Othere."
"Umph! Longfellow wrote that poem. I don't care about writing things any
more. I want to read." He was thoroughly out of tune now, and raging over my
own ill-luck, I left him.
Conceive yourself at the door of the world's treasure-house guarded by a
child--an idle irresponsible child playing knuckle-bones--on whose favor
depends the gift of the key, and you will imagine one-half my torment. Till
that evening Charlie had spoken nothing that might not lie within the
experiences of a Greek galley-slave. But now, or there was no virtue in books,
he had talked of some desperate adventure of the Vikings, of Thorfin
Karlsefne's sailing to Wineland, which is America, in the ninth or tenth
century. The battle in the harbor he had seen; and his own death he had
described. But this was a much more startling plunge into the past. Was it
possible that he had skipped half a dozen lives and was then dimly remembering
some episode of a thousand years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the
worst of it was that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person
in the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to bed
that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing that was not
possible if Charlie's detestable memory only held good.
I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karlsefne as it had never been written
before, might tell the story of the first discovery of America, myself the
discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie's mercy, and so long as there was a
three-and-six-penny Bohn volume within his reach Charlie would not tell. I
dared not curse him openly; I hardly dared jog his memory, for I was dealing
with the experiences of a thousand years ago, told through the mouth of a boy
of today; and a boy of today is affected by every change of tone and gust of
opinion, so that he lies even when he desires to speak the truth.
I saw no more of him for nearly a week. When next I met him it was in
Gracechurch Street with a billbook chained to his waist.
Business took him over London Bridge and I accompanied him. He was very full
of the importance of that book and magnified it.
As we passed over the Thames we paused to look at a steamer unloading great
slabs of white and brown marble. A barge drifted under the steamer's stern and
a lonely cow in that barge bellowed.
Charlie's face changed from the face of the bank-clerk to that of an unknown
and--though he would not have believed this--a much shrewder man. He flung out
his arm across the parapet of the bridge, and laughing very loudly, said:
"When they heard our bulls bellow the Skroelings ran away!"
I waited only for an instant, but the barge and the cow had disappeared under
the bows of the steamer before I answered.
"Charlie, what do you suppose are Skroelings?"
"Never heard of 'em before. They sound like a new kind of seagull. What a chap
you are for asking questions!" he replied. "I have to go to the cashier of the
Omnibus Company yonder. Will you wait for me and we can lunch somewhere
together? I've a notion for a poem."
"No, thanks. I'm off. You're sure you know nothing about Skroelings?"
"Not unless he's been entered for the Liverpool Handicap." He nodded and
disappeared in the crowd.
Now it is written in the Saga of Eric the Red or that of Thorfin Karlsefne,
that nine hundred years ago when Karlsefne's galleys came to Leif's booths,
which Leif had erected in the unknown land called Markland, which may or may
not have been Rhode Island, the Skroelings--and the Lord He knows who these
may or may not have been--came to trade with the Vikings, and ran away because
they were frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which Thorfin had brought
with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know of that
affair? I wandered up and down among the streets trying to unravel the
mystery, and the more I considered it, the more baffling it grew. One thing
only seemed certain and that certainty took away my breath for the moment. If
I came to full knowledge of anything at all, it would not be one life of the
soul in Charlie Mears's body, but half a dozen--half a dozen several and
separate existences spent on blue water in the morning of the world!
Then I walked round the situation.
Obviously if I used my knowledge I should stand alone and unapproachable until
all men were as wise as myself. That would be something, but manlike I was
ungrateful. It seemed bitterly unfair that Charlie's memory should fail me
when I needed it most.
Great Powers above--I looked up at them through the fog smoke--did the Lords
of Life and Death know what this meant to me? Nothing less than eternal fame
of the best kind; that comes from One, and is shared by one alone. I would be
content--remembering Clive, I stood astounded at my own moderation,--with the
mere right to tell one story, to work out one little contribution to the light
literature of the day. If Charlie were permitted full recollection for one
hour--for sixty short minutes--of existences that had extended over a thousand
years--I would forego all profit and honor from all that I should make of his
speech. I would take no share in the commotion that would follow throughout
the particular corner of the earth that calls itself "the world." The thing
should be put forth anonymously. Nay, I would make other men believe that they
had written it. They would hire bull-hided self-advertising Englishmen to
bellow it abroad. Preachers would found a fresh conduct of life upon it,
swearing that it was new and that they had lifted the fear of death from all
mankind. Every Orientalist in Europe would patronize it discursively with
Sanskrit and Pali texts. Terrible women would invent unclean variants of the
men's belief for the elevation of their sisters. Churches and religions would
war over it. Between the hailing and re-starting of an omnibus I foresaw the
scuffles that would arise among half a dozen denominations all professing "the
doctrine of the True Metempsychosis as applied to the world and the New Era";
and saw, too, the respectable English newspapers shying, like frightened kine,
over the beautiful simplicity of the tale. The mind leaped forward a hundred--
two hundred--a thousand years. I saw with sorrow that men would mutilate and
garble the story; that rival creeds would turn it upside down till, at last,
the western world which clings to the dread of death more closely than the
hope of life, would set it aside as an interesting superstition and stampede
after some faith so long forgotten that it seemed altogether new. Upon this I
changed the terms of the bargain that I would make with the Lords of Life and
Death. Only let me know, let me write, the story with sure knowledge that I
wrote the truth, and I would burn the manuscript as a solemn sacrifice. Five
minutes after the last line was written I would destroy it all. But I must be
allowed to write it with absolute certainty.
There was no answer. The flaming colors of an Aquarium poster caught my eye
and I wondered whether it would be wise or prudent to lure Charlie into the
hands of the professional mesmerist, and whether, if he were under his power,
he would speak of his past lives. If he did, and if people believed him--but
Charlie would be frightened and flustered, or made conceited by the
interviews. In either case he would begin to lie, through fear or vanity. He
was safest in my own hands.
"They are very funny fools, your English," said a voice at my elbow, and
turning round I recognized a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law student,
called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to become
civilized. The old man was a retired native official, and on an income of five
pounds a month contrived to allow his son two hundred pounds a year, and the
run of his teeth in a city where he could pretend to be the cadet of a royal
house, and tell stories of the brutal Indian bureaucrats who ground the faces
of the poor.
Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied Bengali dressed with scrupulous
care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers and tan gloves. But I had known
him in the days when the brutal Indian Government paid for his university
education, and he contributed cheap sedition to Sachi Durpan, and intrigued
with the wives of his schoolmates.
"That is very funny and very foolish," he said, nodding at the poster. "I am
going down to the Northbrook Club. Will you come too?"
I walked with him for some time. "You are not well," he said. "What is there
in your mind? You do not talk."
"Grish Chunder, you've been too well educated to believe in a God, haven't
vou?"
"Oah, yes, here! But when I go home I must conciliate popular superstition,
and make ceremonies of purification, and my women will anoint idols."
"And bang up tulsi and feast the purohit, and take you back into caste again
and make a good khuttri of you again, you advanced social Free-thinker. And
you'll eat desi food, and like it all, from the smell in the courtyard to the
mustard oil over you."
"I shall very much like it," said Grish Chunder, unguardedly. "Once a Hindu--
always a Hindu. But I like to know what the English think they know."
"I'll tell you something that one Englishman knows. It's an old tale to you."
I began to tell the story of Charlie in English, but Grish Chunder put a
question in the vernacular, and the history went forward naturally in the
tongue best suited for its telling. After all it could never have been told in
English. Grish Chunder heard me, nodding from time to time, and then came up
to my rooms where I finished the tale.
"Beshak," he said, philosophically. "Lekin darwaza band hai. (Without doubt,
but the door is shut.) I have heard of this remembering of previous existences
among my people. It is of course an old tale with us, but, to happen to an
Englishman--a cow-fed Malechk--an outcast. By Jove, that is most peculiar!"
"Outcast yourself, Grish Chunder! You eat cow-beef every day. Let's think the
thing over. The boy remembers his incarnations."
"Does he know that?" said Grish Chunder, quietly, swinging his legs as he sat
on my table. He was speaking in English now.
"He does not know anything. Would I speak to you if he did? Go on!"
"There is no going on at all. If you tell that to your friends they will say
you are mad and put it in the papers. Suppose, now, you prosecute for libel."
"Let's leave that out of the question entirely. Is there any chance of his
being made to speak?"
"There is a chance. Oah, yess! But if he spoke it would mean that all this
world would end now--instanto--fall down on your head. These things are not
allowed, you know. As I said, the door is shut."
"Not a ghost of a chance?"
"How can there be? You are a Christian, and it is forbidden to eat, in your
books, of the Tree of Life, or else you would never die. How shall you all
fear death if you all know what your friend does not know that he knows? I am
afraid to be kicked, but I am not afraid to die, because I know what I know.
You are not afraid to be kicked, but you are afraid to die. If you were not,
by God! you English would be all over the shop in an hour, upsetting the
balances of power, and making commotions. It would not be good. But no fear.
He will remember a little and a little less, and he will call it dreams. Then
he will forget altogether. When I passed my First Arts Examination in Calcutta
that was all in the cram-book on Wordsworth. Trailing clouds of glory, you
know."
"This seems to be an exception to the rule."
"There are no exceptions to rules. Some are not so hard-looking as others, but
they are all the same when you touch. If this friend of yours said so-and-so
and so-and-so, indicating that he remembered all his lost lives, or one piece
of a lost life, he would not be in the bank another hour. He would be what you
called sack because he was mad, and they would send him to an asylum for
lunatics. You can see that, my friend."
"Of course I can, but I wasn't thinking of him. His name need never appear in
the story."
"Ah! I see. That story will never be written. You can try."
"I am going to."
"For your own credit and for the sake of money, of course?"
"No. For the sake of writing the story. On my honor that will be all."
"Even then there is no chance. You cannot play with the Gods. It is a very
pretty story now. As they say, Let it go on that--I mean at that. Be quick;
he will not last long."
"How do you mean?"
"What I say. He has never, so far, thought about a woman."
"Hasn't he though!" I remembered some of Charlie's confidences.
"I mean no woman has thought about him. When that comes; bushogya--all up' I
know. There are millions of women here. Housemaids, for instance."
I winced at the thought of my story being ruined by a housemaid.
And yet nothing was more probable.
Grish Chunder grinned.
"Yes--also pretty girls--cousins of his house, and perhaps not of his house.
One kiss that he gives back again and remembers will cure all this nonsense.
or else"--
"Or else what? Remember he does not know that he knows."
"I know that. Or else, if nothing happens he will become immersed in the trade
and the financial speculations like the rest. It must be so. You can see that
it must be so. But the woman will come first, I think."
There was a rap at the door, and Charlie charged in impetuously. He had been
released from office, and by the look in his eyes I could see that he had come
over for a long talk; most probably with poems in his pockets. Charlie's poems
were very wearying, but sometimes they led him to talk about the galley.
Grish Chunder looked at him keenly for a minute.
"I beg your pardon," Charlie said, uneasily; "I didn't know you had any one
with you."
"I am going," said Grish Chunder.
He drew me into the lobby as he departed.
"That is your man," he said, quickly. "I tell you he will never speak all you
wish. That is rot--bosh. But he would be most good to make to see things.
Suppose now we pretend that it was only play"--I had never seen Grish Chunder
so excited--"and pour the ink-pool into his hand. Eh, what do you think? I
tell you that he could see anything that a man could see. Let me get the ink
and the camphor. He is a seer and he will tell us very many things."
"He may be all you say, but I'm not going to trust him to your Gods and
devils."
"It will not hurt him. He will only feel a little stupid and dull when he
wakes up. You have seen boys look into the ink-pool before."
"That is the reason why I am not going to see it any more. You'd better go,
Grish Chunder."
He went, declaring far down the staircase that it was throwing away my only
chance of looking into the future.
This left me unmoved, for I was concerned for the past, and no peering of
hypnotized boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me do that. But I
recognized Grish Chunder's point of view and sympathized with it.
"What a big black brute that was!" said Charlie, when I returned to him.
"Well, look here, I've just done a poem; dil it instead of playing dominoes
after lunch. May I read it?"
"Let me read it to myself."
"Then you miss the proper expression. Besides, you always make my things sound
as if the rhymes were all wrong."
"Read it aloud, then. You're like the rest of 'em."
Charlie mouthed me his poem, and it was not much worse than the average of his
verses. He had been reading his book faithfully, but he was not pleased when I
told him that I preferred my Longfellow undiluted with Charlie.
Then we began to go through the MS. line by line; Charlie parrying every
objection and correction with: "Yes, that may be better, but you don't catch
what I'm driving at."
Charlie was, in one way at least, very like one kind of poet.
There was a pencil scrawl at the back of the paper and "What's that?" I said.
"Oh that's not poetry 't all. It's some rot I wrote last night before I went
to bed and it was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so I made it a sort of a
blank verse instead."
Here is Charlie's "blank verse":
"We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low.
"Will you never let us go?
"We ate bread and onions when you took towns or ran aboard quickly when you
were beaten back by the foe,
"The captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing songs, but
we were below,
"We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle
for we still swung to and fro.
"Will you never let us go?
"The salt made the oar handles like sharkskin; our knees were cut to the bone
with salt cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut
to our gums and you whipped us because we could not row.
"Will you never let us go?
"But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water runs
along the oarblade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will
never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly
of the sail. Aho!
"Will you never let us go?"
"H'm. What's oar-thresh, Charlie?"
"The water washed up by the oars. That's the sort of song they might sing in
the galley, y'know. Aren't you ever going to finish that story and give me
some of the profits?"
"It depends on yourself. If you had only told me more about your hero in the
first instance it might have been finished by now. You're so hazy in your
notions."
"I only want to give you the general notion of it--the knocking about from
place to place and the fighting and all that. Can't you fill in the rest
yourself? Make the hero save a girl on a pirate-galley and marry her or do
something."
"You're a really helpful collaborator. I suppose the hero went through some
few adventures before he married."
"Well then, make him a very artful card--a low sort of man--a sort of
political man who went about making treaties and breaking them--a black-haired
chap who hid behind the mast when the fighting began."
"But you said the other day that he was red-haired."
"I couldn't have. Make him black-haired of course. You've no imagination."
Seeing that I had just discovered the entire principles upon which the half-
memory falsely called imagination is based, I felt entitled to laugh, but
forbore, for the sake of the tale.
"You're right. You're the man with imagination. A black-haired chap in a
decked ship," I said.
"No, an open ship--like a big boat."
This was maddening.
"Your ship has been built and designed, closed and decked in; you said so
yourself," I protested.
"No, no, not that ship. That was open, or half decked because--By Jove you're
right. You made me think of the hero as a red-haired chap. Of course if he
were red, the ship would be an open one with painted sails."
Surely, I thought he would remember now that he had served in two galleys at
least--in a three-decked Greek one under the black-haired "political man," and
again in a Viking's open sea-serpent under the man "red as a red bear" who
went to Markland. The devil prompted me to speak.
"Why, 'of course,' Charlie?" said I. "I don't know. Are you making fun of me?"
The current was broken for the time being. I took up a notebook and pretended
to make many entries in it.
"It's a pleasure to work with an imaginative chap like yourself," I said after
a pause. "The way that you've brought out the character of the hero is simply
wonderful."
"Do you think so?" he answered, with a pleased flush. "I often tell myself
that there's more in me than my--than people think."
"There's an enormous amount in you."
"Then, won't you let me send an essay on The Ways of Bank Clerks to Tit-Bits,
and get the guinea prize?"
"That wasn't exactly what I meant, old fellow: perhaps it would be better to
wait a little and go ahead with the galley-story."
"Ah, but I sha'n't get the credit of that. Tit-Bits would publish my name and
address if I win. What are you grinning at? They would."
"I know it. Suppose you go for a walk. I want to look through my notes about
our story."
Now this reprehensible youth who left me, a little hurt and put back, might
for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of the Argo--had been
certainly slave or comrade to Thorfin Karlsefne. Therefore he was deeply
interested in guinea competitions. Remembering what Grish Chunder had said I
laughed aloud. The Lords of Life and Death would never allow Charlie Mears to
speak with full knowledge of his pasts, and I must even piece out what he had
told me with my own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-
clerks.
I got together and placed on one file all my notes; and the net result was not
cheering. I read them a second time. There was nothing that might not have
been compiled at second-hand from other people's books--except, perhaps, the
story of the fight in the harbor. The adventures of a Viking bad been written
many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing, and
though I wrote both, who could challenge or confirm the accuracy of my
details? I might as well tell a tale of two thousand years hence. The Lords of
Life and Death were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted. They would allow
nothing to escape that might trouble or make easy the minds of men. Though I
was convinced of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. Exaltation
followed reaction, not once, but twenty times in the next few weeks. My moods
varied with the March sunlight and flying clouds. By night or in the beauty of
a spring morning I perceived that I could write that tale and shift continents
thereby. In the wet, windy afternoons, I saw that the tale might indeed be
written, but would be nothing more than a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted
piece of Wardour Street work at the end. Then I blessed Charlie in many ways--
though it was no fault of his. He seemed to be busy with prize competitions,
and I saw less and less of him as the weeks went by and the earth cracked and
grew ripe to spring, and the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to
read or talk of what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion
in his voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met; but
Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from which money
was to be made.
"I think I deserve twenty-five per cent., don't I, at least," be said, with
beautiful frankness. "I supplied all the ideas, didn't I?"
This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed that it had
been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking up the curious nasal
drawl of the underbred City man.
"When the thing's done we'll talk about it. I can't make anything of it at
present. Red-haired or black-haired hero are equally difficult."
He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. "I can't understand what
you find so difficult. It's all as clean as mud to me," he replied. A jet of
gas puffed out between the bars, took light and whistled softly. "Suppose we
take the red-haired hero's adventures first, from the time that he came south
to my galley and captured it and sailed to the Beaches."
I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of pen and
paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break the current. The
gas-jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie's voice dropped almost to a whisper, and
he told a tale of the sailing of an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets
on the open sea, seen under the curve of the one sail evening after evening
when the galley's beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and
"we sailed by that for we had no other guide," quoth Charlie. He spoke of a
landing on an island and explorations in its woods, where the crew killed
three men whom they found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said,
followed the galley, swimming and choking in the water, and the crew cast lots
and threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to the strange gods
whom they had offended. Then they ate sea-weed when their provisions failed,
and their legs swelled, and their leader, the red-haired man, killed two
rowers who mutinied, and after a year spent among the woods they set sail for
their own country, and a wind that never failed carried them back so safely
that they all slept at night. This and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the
voice fell so low that I could not catch the words, though every nerve was on
the strain. He spoke of their leader, the red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of
his God; for it was he who cheered them and slew them impartially as he
thought best for their needs; and it was he who steered them for three days
among floating ice, each floe crowded with strange beasts that "tried to sail
with us," said Charlie, "and we beat them back with the handles of the oars."
The gas-jet went out, a burned coal gave way, and the fire settled down with a
tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased speaking, and I said no
word.
"By Jove!" he said, at last, shaking his head. "I've been staring at the fire
till I'm dizzy. What was I going to say?"
"Something about the galley."
"I remember now. It's 25 per cent. of the profits, isn't it?"
"It's anything you like when I've done the tale."
"I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I've, I've an appointment." And
he left me.
Had my eyes not been held I might have known that that broken muttering over
the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the prelude to
fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the Lords of Life and
Death!
When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was nervous and
embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his lips a little
parted.
"I've done a poem," he said; and then quickly: "it's the best I've ever done.
Read it." He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the window.
I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise--that is
to say praise--the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason
to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favorite centipede metres, had launched
into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it.
This is what I read:
"The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!
"She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky:
Grey sea, she is mine alone--I
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho' they be but stone!
'Mine! I have won her O good brown earth,
Make merry! 'Tis bard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing."
"Yes, it's the early harrowing, past a doubt," I said, with a dread at my
heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.
"Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!"
"Well?" said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.
I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid a
photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head, and a
foolish slack mouth.
"Isn't it--isn't it wonderful?" he whispered, pink to the tips of his ears,
wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. "I didn't know; I didn't think--it
came like a thunderclap."
"Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?"
"My God--she--she loves me!" He sat down repeating the last words to himself.
I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-
work, and wondered when, where, and bow he had loved in his past lives.
"What will your mother say?" I asked, cheerfully.
"I don't care a damn what she says."
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be
many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently;
and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly named
beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that
She was a tobacconist's assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had
told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man
before.
Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of
years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the
Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we
may not remember our first wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without
inhabitants in a hundred years.
"Now, about that galley-story," I said, still more cheerfully, in a pause in
the rush of the speech.
Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. "The galley--what galley? Good
heavens, don't joke, man! This is serious! You don't know how serious it is!"
Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills
remembrance, and the "finest story" in the world would never be written.
* * * * * *
VOLUME IV UNDER THE DEODARS
THE EDUCATION OF OTIS YEERE
I
In the pleasant orchard-closes
"God bless all our gains," say we;
But "May God bless all our losses,"
Better suits with our degree.
--The Lost Bower.
This is the history of a failure; but the woman who failed said that it might
be an instructive tale to put into print for the benefit of the younger
generation. The younger generation does not want instruction, being perfectly
willing to instruct if any one will listen to it. None the less, here begins
the story where every right-minded story should begin, that is to say at
Simla, where all things begin and many come to an evil end.
The mistake was due to a very clever woman making a blunder and not retrieving
it. Men are licensed to stumble, but a clever woman's mistake is outside the
regular course of Nature and Providence; since all good people know that a
woman is the only infallible thing in this world, except Government Paper of
the '70 issue, bearing interest at four and a half per cent. Yet, we have to
remember that six consecutive days of rehearsing the leading part of The
Fallen Age, at the New Gaiety Theatre where the plaster is not yet properly
dry, might have brought about an unhingement of spirits which, again, might
have led to eccentricities.
Mrs. Hauksbee came to "The Foundry" to tiffin with Mrs. Mallowe, her one bosom
friend, for she was in no sense "a woman's woman." And it was a woman's
tiffin, the door shut to all the world; and they both talked chiffons, which
is French for Mysteries.
"I've enjoyed an interval of sanity," Mrs. Hauksbee announced, after tiffin
was over and the two were comfortably settled in the little writing-room that
opened out of Mrs. Mallowe's bedroom.
"My dear girl, what has he done?" said Mrs. Mallowe, sweetly. It is noticeable
that ladies of a certain age call each other "dear girl," just as
commissioners of twenty-eight years' standing address their equals in the
Civil List as "my boy."
"There's no he in the case. Who am I that an imaginary man should be always
credited to me? Am I an Apache?"
"No, dear, but somebody's scalp is generally drying at your wigwam-door.
Soaking, rather."
This was an allusion to the Hawley Boy, who was in the habit of riding all
across Simla in the Rains, to call on Mrs. Hauksbee. That lady laughed.
"For my sins, the Aide at Tyrconnel last night told me off to The Mussuck.
Hsh! Don't laugh. One of my most devoted admirers. When the duff came--some
one really ought to teach them to make pudding at Tyrconnel--The Mussuck was
at liberty to attend to me."
"Sweet soul! I know his appetite," said Mrs. Mallowe. "Did he, oh did he,
begin his wooing?"
"By a special mercy of Providence, no. He explained his importance as a Pillar
of the Empire. I didn't laugh."
"Lucy, I don't believe you."
"Ask Captain Sangar; he was on the other side. Well, as I was saying, The
Mussuck dilated."
"I think I can see him doing it," said Mrs. Mallowe, pensively, scratching her
fox-terrier's ears.
"I was properly impressed. Most properly. I yawned openly. 'Strict
supervision, and play them off one against the other,' said The Mussuck,
shoveling down his ice by tureenfuls, I assure you. 'That, Mrs. Hauksbee, is
the secret of our Government.'"
Mrs. Mallowe laughed long and merrily. "And what did you say?"
"Did you ever know me at loss for an answer yet? I said: 'So I have observed
in my dealings with you.' The Mussuck swelled with pride. He is coming to call
on me tomorrow. The Hawley Boy is coming too."
"'Strict supervision and play them off one against the other. That, Mrs.
Hauksbee, is the secret of our Government.' And I dare say if we could get to
The Mussuck's heart, we should find that he considers himself a man of the
world."
"As he is of the other two things. I like The Mussuck, and I won't have you
call him names. He amuses me."
"He has reformed you, too, by what appears. Explain the interval of sanity,
and hit Tim on the nose with the paper-cutter, please. That dog is too fond of
sugar. Do you take milk in yours?"
"No, thanks. Polly, I'm wearied of this life. It's hollow."
"Turn religious, then. I always said that Rome would be your fate."
"Only exchanging half a dozen attaches in red for one and in black, and if I
fasted, the wrinkles would come, and never, never go. Has it ever struck you,
dear, that I'm getting old?"
"Thanks for your courtesy. I'll return it. Ye-es we are both not exactly--how
shall I put it?"
"What we have been. 'I feel it in my bones,' as Mrs. Crossley says. Polly,
I've wasted my life."
"As how?"
"Never mind how. I feel it. I want to be a Power before I die."
"Be a Power then. You've wits enough for anything--and beauty?"
Mrs. Hauksbee pointed a teaspoon straight at her hostess. "Polly, if you heap
compliments on me like this, I shall cease to believe that you're a woman.
Tell me how I am to be a Power."
"Inform The Mussuck that he is the most fascinating and slimmest man in Asia,
and he'll tell you anything and everything you please."
"Bother The Mussuck! I mean an intellectual Power--not a gas-power. Polly, I'm
going to start a salon."
Mrs. Mallowe turned lazily on the sofa and rested her head on her hand. "Hear
the words of the Preacher, the son of Baruch," she said.
"Will you talk sensibly?"
"I will, dear, for I see that you are going to make a mistake."
"I never made a mistake in my life at least, never one that I couldn't explain
away afterward."
"Going to make a mistake," went on Mrs. Mallowe, composedly. "It is impossible
to start a salon in Simla. A bar would be much more to the point."
"Perhaps, but why? It seems so easy."
"Just what makes it so difficult. How many clever women are there in Simla?"
"Myself and yourself," said Mrs. Hauksbee, without a moment's hesitation.
"Modest woman! Mrs. Feardon would thank you for that. And how many clever
men?"
"Oh--er--hundreds," said Mrs. Hauksbee, vaguely.
"What a fatal blunder! Not one. They are all bespoke of the Government. Take
my husband, for instance. Jack was a clever man, though I say so who
shouldn't. Government has eaten him up. All his ideas and powers of
conversation--he really used to be a good talker, even to his wife, in the old
days--are taken from him by this--this kitchen-sink of a Government. That's
the case with every man up here who is at work. I don't suppose a Russian
convict under the knout is able to amuse the rest of his gang; and all our
men-folk here are gilded convicts."
"But there are scores--"
"I know what you're going to say. Scores of idle men up on leave. I admit it,
but they are all of two objectionable sets, The Civilian who'd be delightful
if he had the military man's knowledge of the world and style, and the
military man who'd be adorable if lie had the Civilian's culture."
"Detestable word! Have Civilians Culchaw? I never studied the breed deeply."
"Don't make fun of Jack's service. Yes. They're like the teapots in the Lakka
Bazar--good material but not polished. They can't help themselves, poor dears.
A Civilian only begins to be tolerable after he has knocked about the world
for fifteen years."
"And a military man?"
"When he has had the same amount of service. The young of both species are
horrible. You would have scores of them in your salon."
"I would not!" said Mrs. Hauksbee, fiercely. "I would tell the bearer to
darwaza band them. I'd put their own colonels and commissioners at the door to
turn them away. I'd give them to the Topsham girl to play with."
"The Topsham girl would be grateful for the gift. But to go back to the salon.
Allowing that you had gathered all your men and women together, what would you
do with them? Make them talk? They would all with one accord begin to flirt.
Your salon would become a glorified Peliti's--a 'Scandal Point' by lamplight."
"There's a certain amount of wisdom in that view."
"There's all the wisdom in the world in it. Surely, twelve Simla seasons ought
to have taught you that you can't focus anything in India; and a salon, to be
any good at all, must be permanent. In two seasons your roomful would be
scattered all over Asia. We are only little bits of dirt on the hillsides--
here one day and blown down the khud the next. We have lost the art of
talking--at least our men have. We have no cohesion"--
"George Eliot in the flesh," interpolated Mrs. Hauksbee, wickedly.
"And collectively, my dear scoffer, we, men and women alike, have no
influence.
"Come into the veranda and look at the Mall!"
The two looked down on the now rapidly filling road, for all Simla was abroad
to steal a stroll between a shower and a fog.
"How do you propose to fix that river? Look! There's The Mussuck--head of
goodness knows what. He is a power in the land, though he does eat like a
costermonger. There's Colonel Blone, and General Grucher, and Sir Dugald
Delane, and Sir Henry Haughton, and Mr. Jellalatty. All Heads of Departments,
and all powerful."
"And all my fervent admirers," said Mrs. Hauksbee, piously. "Sir Henry
Haughton raves about me. But go on."
"One by one, these men are worth something. Collectively, they're just a mob
of Anglo-Indians. Who cares for what Anglo-Indians say? Your salon won't weld
the Departments together and make you mistress of India, dear. And these
creatures won't talk administrative 'shop' in a crowd--your salon--because
they are so afraid of the men in the lower ranks overhearing it. They have
forgotten what of Literature and Art they ever knew, and the women"--
"Can't talk about anything except the last Gymkhana, or the sins of their last
nurse. I was calling on Mrs. Derwills this morning."
"You admit that? They can talk to the subalterns though, and the subalterns
can talk to them. Your salon would suit their views admirably, if you
respected the religious prejudices of the country and provided plenty of kala
juggahs."
"Plenty of kala juggahs. Oh my poor little idea! Kala juggahs in a salon! But
who made you so awfully clever?"
"Perhaps I've tried myself; or perhaps I know a woman who has. I have preached
and expounded the whole matter and the conclusion thereof"--
"You needn't go on. 'Is Vanity.' Polly, I thank you. These vermin--" Mrs.
Hauksbee waved her hand from the veranda to two men in the crowd below who had
raised their hats to her--"these vermin shall not rejoice in a new Scandal
Point or an extra Peliti's. I will abandon the notion of a salon. It did seem
so tempting, though. But what shall I do? I must do something."
"Why? Are not Abana and Pharphar"--
"Jack has made you nearly as bad as himself! I want to, of course. I'm tired
of everything and everybody, from a moonlight picnic at Seepee to the
blandishments of The Mussuck."
"Yes--that comes, too, sooner or later, Have you nerve enough to make your bow
yet?"
Mrs. Hauksbee's mouth shut grimly. Then she laughed. "I think I see myself
doing it. Big pink placards on the Mall: 'Mrs. Hauksbee! Positively her last
appearance on any stage! This is to give notice!' No more dances; no more
rides; no more luncheons; no more theatricals with supper to follow; no more
sparring with one's dearest, dearest friend; no more fencing with an
inconvenient man who hasn't wit enough to clothe what he's pleased to call his
sentiments in passable speech; no more parading of The Mussuck while Mrs.
Tarkass calls all round Simla, spreading horrible stories about me? No more of
anything that is thoroughly wearying, abominable and detestable, but, all the
same, makes life worth the having. Yes! I see it all! Don't interrupt, Polly,
I'm inspired. A mauve and white striped 'cloud' round my excellent shoulders,
a seat in the fifth row of the Gaiety, and both horses sold. Delightful
vision! A comfortable armchair, situated in three different draughts, at every
ballroom; and nice, large, sensible shoes for all the couples to stumble over
as they go into the veranda! Then at supper. Can't you imagine the scene? The
greedy mob gone away. Reluctant subaltern, pink all over like a newly-powdered
baby--they really ought to tan subalterns before they are exported--Polly--
sent back by the hostess to do his duty. Slouches up to me across the room,
tugging at a glove two sizes too large for him--I hate a man who wears gloves
like overcoats--and trying to look as if he'd thought of it from the first.
'May I ah--have the pleasure 'f takin' you 'nt' supper?' Then I get up with a
hungry smile. Just like this."
"Lucy, how can you be so absurd?"
"And sweep out on his arm. So! After supper I shall go away early, you know,
because I shall be afraid of catching cold. No one will look for my 'rickshaw.
Mine, so please you! I shall stand, always with that mauve and white 'cloud'
over my head, while the wet soaks into my dear, old, venerable feet and Tom
swears and shouts for the mem-sahib's gharri. Then home to bed at half-past
eleven! Truly excellent life helped out by the visits of the Padri, just fresh
from burying somebody down below there." She pointed through the pines, toward
the Cemetery, and continued with vigorous dramatic gesture--"Listen! I see it
all down, down even to the stays! Such stays! Six-eight a pair, Polly, with
red flannel--or list is it?--that they put into the tops of those fearful
things. I can draw you a picture of them."
"Lucy, for Heaven's sake, don't go waving your arms about in that idiotic
manner! Recollect, every one can see you from the Mall."
"Let them see! They'll think I am rehearsing for The Fallen Angel. Look!
There's The Mussuck. How badly he rides. There!"
She blew a kiss to the venerable Indian administrator with infinite grace.
"Now," she continued, "he'll be chaffed about that at the Club in the delicate
manner those brutes of men affect, and the Hawley Boy will tell me all about
it--softening the details for fear of shocking me. That boy is too good to
live, Polly. I've serious thoughts of recommending him to throw up his
Commission and go into the Church. In his present frame of mind he would obey
me. Happy, happy child."
"Never again," said Mrs. Mallowe, with an affectation of indignation, "shall
you tiffin here! 'Lucindy, your behavior is scand'lus.'"
"All your fault," retorted Mrs. Hauksbee, "for suggesting such a thing as my
abdication. No! Jamais--nevaire! I will act, dance, ride, frivol, talk
scandal, dine out, and appropriate the legitimate captives of any woman I
choose until I d-r-r-rop or a better woman than I puts me to shame before all
Simla--and it's dust and ashes in my mouth while I'm doing it!"
She swept into the drawing-room, Mrs. Mallowe followed and put an arm round
her waist.
"I'm not!" said Mrs. Hauksbee, defiantly, rummaging for her handkerchief.
"I've been dining out the last ten nights, and rehearsing in the afternoon.
You'd be tired yourself. It's only because I'm tired."
Mrs. Mallowe did not offer Mrs. Hauksbee any pity or ask her to lie down, but
gave her another cup of tea, and went on with the talk.
"I've been through that too, dear," she said.
"I remember," said Mrs. Hauksbee, a gleam of fun on her face. "In '84 wasn't
it? You went out a great deal less next season."
Mrs. Mallowe smiled in a superior and Sphinxlike fashion.
"I became an Influence," said she.
"Good gracious, child, you didn't join the Theosophists and kiss Buddha's big
toe, did you? I tried to get into their set once, but they cast me out for a
skeptic--without a chance of improving my poor little mind, too."
"No, I didn't Theosophilander. Jack says"--
"Never mind Jack. What a husband says is known before. What did you do?"
"I made a lasting impression."
"So have I--for four months. But that didn't console me in the least. I hated
the man. Will you stop smiling in that inscrutable way and tell me what you
mean?"
Mrs. Mallowe told.
* * * * * *
"And--you--mean--to--say that it is absolutely Platonic on both sides?"
"Absolutely, or I should never have taken it up."
"And his last promotion was due to you?"
Mrs. Mallowe nodded.
"And you warned him against the Topsham girl?"
Another nod.
"And told him of Sir Dugald Delane's private memo about him?"
A third nod.
"Why?"
"What a question to ask a woman! Because it amused me at first. I am proud of
my property now. If I live he shall continue to be successful. Yes, I will put
him upon the straight road to Knighthood, and everything else that a man
values. The rest depends upon himself."
"Polly, you are a most extraordinary woman."
"Not in the least. I'm concentrated, that's all. You diffuse yourself, dear;
and though all Simla knows your skill in managing a team"--
"Can't you choose a prettier word?"
"Team, of half a dozen, from The Mussuck to the Hawley Boy, you gain nothing
by it. Not even amusement."
"And you?"
"Try my recipe. Take a man, not a boy, mind, but an almost mature, unattached
man, and be this guide, philosopher, and friend. You'll find it the most
interesting occupation that you ever embarked on. It can be done--you needn't
look like that--because I've done it."
"There's an element of risk about it that makes the notion attractive. I'll
get such a man and say to him, 'Now, understand that there must be no
flirtation. Do exactly what I tell you, profit by my instruction and counsels,
and all will yet be well,' as Toole says. Is that the idea?"
"More or less," said Mrs. Mallowe with an unfathomable smile. "But be sure he
understands that there must be no flirtation."
II
Dribble-dribble-trickle-trickle
What a lot of raw dust!
My dollie's had an accident
And out came all the sawdust!
--Nursery Rhyme.
So Mrs. Hauksbee, in "The Foundry" which overlooks Simla Mall, sat at the feet
of Mrs. Mallowe and gathered wisdom. The end of the Conference was the Great
Idea upon which Mrs. Hauksbee so plumed herself.
"I warn you," said Mrs. Mallowe, beginning to repent of her suggestion, "that
the matter is not half so easy as it looks. Any woman--even the Topsham girl--
can catch a man, but very, very few know how to manage him when caught."
"My child," was the answer, "I've been a female St. Simon Stylites looking
down upon men for these--these years past. Ask The Mussuck whether I can
manage them."
Mrs. Hauksbee departed humming, "I'll go to him and say to him in manner most
ironical." Mrs. Mallowe laughed to herself. Then she grew suddenly sober. "I
wonder whether I've done well in advising that amusement? Lucy's a clever
woman, but a thought too careless."
A week later, the two met at a Monday Pop. "Well?" said Mrs. Mallowe.
"I've caught him!" said Mrs. Hauksbee; her eyes were dancing with merriment.
"Who is it, mad woman? I'm sorry I ever spoke to you about it."
"Look between the pillars. In the third row; fourth from the end. You can see
his face now. Look!"
"Otis Yeere! Of all the improbable and impossible people! I don't believe
you."
"Hsh! Wait till Mrs. Tarkass begins murdering Milton Wellings; and I'll tell
you all about it. S-s-ss! That woman's voice always reminds me of an
Underground train coming into Earl's Court with the brakes on. Now listen. It
is really Otis Yeere."
"So I see, but does it follow that he is your property?"
"He is! By right of trove. I found him, lonely and unbefriended, the very next
night after our talk, at the Dugald Delane's burra-khana. I liked his eyes,
and I talked to him. Next day he called. Next day we went for a ride together,
and today he's tied to my 'rickshaw-wheels hand and foot. You'll see when the
concert's over. He doesn't know I'm here yet."
"Thank goodness you haven't chosen a boy. What are you going to do with him,
assuming that you've got him?"
"Assuming, indeed! Does a woman--do I--ever make a mistake in that sort of
thing? First"--Mrs. Hauksbee ticked off the items ostentatiously on her little
gloved fingers--"First, my dear, I shall dress him properly. At present his
raiment is a disgrace, and he wears a dress shirt like a crumpled sheet of the
'Pioneer'. Secondly, after I have made him presentable, I shall form his
manners--his morals are above reproach."
"You seem to have discovered a great deal about him considering the shortness
of your acquaintance."
"Surely you ought to know that the first proof a man gives of his interest in
a woman is by talking to her about his own sweet self. If the woman listens
without yawning, he begins to like her. If she flatters the animal's vanity,
he ends by adoring her."
"In some cases."
"Never mind the exceptions. I know which one you are thinking of. Thirdly, and
lastly, after he is polished and made pretty, I shall, as you said, be his
guide, philosopher and friend, and he shall become a success--as great a
success as your friend. I always wondered how that man got on. Did The Mussuck
come to you with the Civil List and, dropping on one knee--no, two knees, a'
la Gibbon--hand it to you and say, 'Adorable angel, choose your friend's
appointment'?"
"Lucy, your long experiences of the Military Department have demoralized you.
One doesn't do that sort of thing on the Civil Side."
"No disrespect meant to Jack's Service, my dear. I only asked for information.
Give me three months, and see what changes I shall work in my prey."
"Go your own way since you must. But I'm sorry that I was weak enough to
suggest the amusement."
"'I am all discretion, and may be trusted to an in-finite extent,'" quoted
Mrs. Hauksbee from The Fallen Angel; and the conversation ceased with Mrs.
Tarkass's last, long-drawn war-whoop.
Her bitterest enemies--and she had many--could hardly accuse Mrs. Hauksbee of
wasting her time. Otis Yeere was one of those wandering "dumb" characters,
foredoomed through life to be nobody's property. Ten years in Her Majesty's
Bengal Civil Service, spent, for the most part, in undesirable Districts, had
given him little to be proud of, and nothing to bring confidence. Old enough
to have lost the first fine careless rapture that showers on the immature
'Stunt imaginary Commissionerships and Stars, and sends him into the collar
with coltish earnestness and abandon; too young to be yet able to look back
upon the progress he had made, and thank Providence that under the conditions
of the day he had come even so far, he stood upon the "dead-centre" of his
career. And when a man stands still, he feels the slightest impulse from
without. Fortune had ruled that Otis Yeere should be, for the first part of
his service, one of the rank and file who are ground up in the wheels of the
Administration; losing heart and soul, and mind and strength, in the process.
Until steam replaces manual power in the working of the Empire, there must
always be this percentage--must always be the men who are used up, expended,
in the mere mechanical routine. For these promotion is far off and the mill-
grind of every day very near and instant. The Secretariats know them only by
name; they are not the picked men of the Districts with the Divisions and
Collectorates awaiting them. They are simply the rank and file--the food for
fever--sharing with the ryot and the plough-bullock the honor of being the
plinth on which the State rests. The older ones have lost their aspirations;
the younger are putting theirs aside with a sigh. Both learn to endure
patiently until the end of the day. Twelve years in the rank and file, men
say, will sap the hearts of the bravest and dull the wits of the most keen.
Out of this life Otis Yeere had fled for a few months, drifting, for the sake
of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave was over he would
return to his swampy, sour-green, undermanned district, the native Assistant,
the native Doctor, the native Magistrate, the steaming, sweltering Station,
the ill-kempt City, and the undisguised insolence of the Municipality that
babbled away the lives of men. Life was cheap, however. The soil spawned
humanity, as it bred frogs in the Rains, and the gap of the sickness of one
season was filled to overflowing by the fecundity of the next. Otis was
unfeignedly thankful to lay down his work for a little while and escape from
the seething, whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its
power to cripple, thwart, and annoy the weary-eyed man who, by official irony,
was said to be "in charge" of it.
* * * * * *
"I knew there were women-dowdies in Bengal. They come up here sometimes. But I
didn't know that there were men-dowdies, too."
Then, for the first time, it occurred to Otis Yeere that his clothes were
rather ancestral in appearance. It will be seen from the above that his
friendship with Mrs Hauksbee had made great strides.
As that lady truthfully says, a man is never so happy as when he is talking
about himself. From Otis Yeere's lips Mrs Hauksbee, before long, learned
everything that she wished to know about the subject of her experiment;
learned what manner of life he had led in what she vaguely called "those awful
cholera districts"; learned too, but this knowledge came later, what manner of
life he had purposed to lead and what dreams he had dreamed in the year of
grace '77, before the reality had knocked the heart out of him. Very pleasant
are the shady bridle-paths round Prospect Hill for the telling of such
confidences.
"Not yet," said Mrs. Hauksbee to Mrs. Mallowe. "Not yet. I must wait until the
man is properly dressed, at least. Great Heavens, is it possible that he
doesn't know what an honor it is to be taken up by Me!"
Mrs. Hauksbee did not reckon false modesty as one of her failings.
"Always with Mrs. Hauksbee!" murmured Mrs. Mallowe, with her sweetest smile,
to Otis. "Oh you men, you men! Here are our Punjabis growling because you've
monopolized the nicest woman in Simla. They'll tear you to pieces on the Mall,
some day, Mr. Yeere."
Mrs. Mallowe rattled down-hill, having satisfied herself, by a glance through
the fringe of her sunshade, of the effect of her words.
The shot went home. Of a surety Otis Yeere was somebody in this bewildering
whirl of Simla--had monopolized the nicest woman in it and the Punjabis were
growling. The notion justified a mild glow of vanity. He had never looked upon
his acquaintance with Mrs. Hauksbee as a matter for general interest.
The knowledge of envy was a pleasant feeling to the man of no account. It was
intensified later in the day when a luncher at the Club said, spitefully,
"Well, for a debilitated Ditcher, Yeere, you are going it. Hasn't any kind
friend told you that she's the most dangerous woman in Simla?"
Yeere chuckled and passed out. When, oh when, would his new clothes be ready?
He descended into the Mall to inquire; and Mrs. Hauksbee, coming over the
Church Ridge in her 'rickshaw, looked down upon him approvingly. "He's
learning to carry himself as if he were a man, instead of a piece of
furniture, and"--she screwed up her eyes to see the better through the
sunlight--"he is a man when he holds himself like that. Oh blessed Conceit,
what should we be without you?"
With the new clothes came a new stock of self-confidence. Otis Yeere
discovered that he could enter a room without breaking into a gentle
perspiration--could cross one, even to talk to Mrs. Hauksbee, as though rooms
were meant to be crossed. He was for the first time in nine years proud of
himself, and contented with his life, satisfied with his new clothes, and
rejoicing in the friendship of Mrs. Hauksbee.
"Conceit is what the poor fellow wants," she said in confidence to Mrs.
Mallowe. "I believe they must use Civilians to plough the fields with in Lower
Bengal. You see I have to begin from the very beginning--haven't I? But you'll
admit, won't you, dear, that he is immensely improved since I took him in
hand. Only give me a little more time and he won't know himself."
Indeed, Yeere was rapidly beginning to forget what he had been. One of his own
rank and file put the matter brutally when he asked Yeere, in reference to
nothing, "And who has been making you a Member of Council, lately? You carry
the side of half a dozen of 'em."
"I--I'm awf'ly sorry. I didn't mean it, you know," said Yeere, apologetically.
"There'll be no holding you," continued the old stager, grimly. "Climb down,
Otis--climb down, and get all that beastly affectation knocked out of you with
fever! Three thousand a month wouldn't support it."
Yeere repeated the incident to Mrs. Hauksbee. He had come to look upon her as
his Mother Confessor.
"And you apologized!" she said. "Oh, shame! I hate a man who apologizes. Never
apologize for what your friend called 'side.' Never! It's a man's business to
be insolent and overbearing until he meets with a stronger. Now, you bad boy,
listen to me."
Simply and straightforwardly, as the 'rickshaw loitered round Jakko, Mrs.
Hauksbee preached to Otis Yeere the Great Gospel of Conceit, illustrating it
with living pictures encountered during their Sunday afternoon stroll.
"Good gracious!" she ended, with the personal argument, "you'll apologize next
for being my attache?"
"Never!" said Otis Yeere. "That's another thing altogether. I shall always
be"--
"What's coming?" thought Mrs. Hauksbee.
"Proud of that," said Otis.
"Safe for the present," she said to herself.
"But I'm afraid I have grown conceited. Like Jeshurun, you know. When he waxed
fat, then he kicked. It's the having no worry on one's mind and the Hill air,
I suppose."
"Hill air, indeed!" said Mrs. Hauksbee to herself. "He'd have been hiding in
the Club till the last day of his leave, if I hadn't discovered him." And
aloud--"Why shouldn't you be? You have every right to."
"I! Why?"
"Oh, hundreds of things. I'm not going to waste this lovely afternoon by
explaining; but I know you have. What was that heap of manuscript you showed
me about the grammar of the aboriginal--what's their names?"
"Gullals. A piece of nonsense. I've far too much work to do to bother over
Gullals now. You should see my District. Come down with your husband some day
and I'll show you round. Such a lovely place in the Rains! A sheet of water
with the railway-embankment and the snakes sticking out, and, in the summer,
green flies and green squash. The people would die of fear if you shook a
dogwhip at 'em. But they know you're forbidden to do that, so they conspire to
make your life a burden to you. My District's worked by some man at Darjiling,
on the strength of u native pleader's false reports. Oh, it's a heavenly
place!"
Otis Yeere laughed bitterly.
"There's not the least necessity that you should stay in it. Why do you?"
"Because I must. How'm I to get out of it?"
"How! In a hundred and fifty ways. If there weren't so many people on the
road, I'd like to box your ears. Ask, my dear boy, ask! Look, There is young
Hexarly with six years' service and half your talents. He asked for what he
wanted, and he got it. See, down by the Convent! There's McArthurson who has
come to his present position by asking--sheer, downright asking--after he had
pushed himself out of the rank and file. One man is as good as another in your
service--believe me. I've seen Simla for more seasons than I care to think
about. Do you suppose men are chosen for appointments because of their special
fitness beforehand? You have all passed a high test--what do you call it?--in
the beginning, and, except for the few who have gone altogether to the bad,
you can all work hard. Asking does the rest. Call it cheek, call it insolence,
call it anything you like, but ask! Men argue--yes, I know what men say--that
a man, by the mere audacity of his request, must have some good in him. A weak
man doesn't say: 'Give me this and that.' He whines 'Why haven't I been given
this and that?' If you were in the Army, I should say learn to spin plates or
play a tambourine with your toes. As it is--ask! You belong to a Service that
ought to be able to command the Channel Fleet, or set a leg at twenty minutes'
notice, and yet you hesitate over asking to escape from a squashy green
district where you admit you are not master. Drop the Bengal Government
altogether. Even Darjiling is a little out-of-the-way hole. I was there once,
and the rents were extortionate. Assert yourself. Get the Government of India
to take you over. Try to get on the Frontier, where every man has a grand
chance if he can trust himself. Go somewhere! Do something! You have twice the
wits and three times the presence of the men up here, and, and"--
Mrs. Hauksbee paused for breath; then continued--"and in any way you look at
it, you ought to. You who could go so far!"
"I don't know," said Yeere, rather taken aback by the unexpected eloquence. "1
haven't such a good opinion of myself."
It was not strictly Platonic, hut it was Policy. Mrs. Hauksbee laid her hand
lightly upon the ungloved paw that rested on the turned-back 'rickshaw hood,
and, looking the man full in the face, said tenderly, almost too tenderly, 'I
believe in you if you mistrust yourself. Is that enough, my friend?"
"It is enough," answered Otis, very solemnly.
He was silent for a long time, redreaming the dreams that he had dreamed eight
years ago, but through them all ran, as sheet-lightning through golden cloud,
the light of Mrs. Hauksbee's violet eyes.
Curious and impenetrable are the mazes of Simla life--the only existence in
this desolate land worth the living. Gradually it went abroad among men and
women, in the pauses between dance, play and Gymkhana, that Otis Yeere, the
man with the newly-lit light of self-confidence in his eyes, had "done
something decent" in the wilds whence he came. He had brought an erring
Municipality to reason, appropriated the funds on his own responsibility, and
saved the lives of hundreds, He knew more about the Gullals than any living
man. Had a vast knowledge of the aboriginal tribes; was, in spite of his
juniority, the greatest authority on the aboriginal Gullals. No one quite knew
who or what the Gullals were till The Mussuck, who had been calling on Mrs.
Hauksbee, and prided himself upon picking people's brains, explained they were
a tribe of ferocious hillmen, somewhere near Sikkim, whose friendship even the
Great Indian Empire would find it worth her while to secure. Now we know that
Otis Yeere had showed Mrs. Hauksbee his MS notes of six years' standing on the
same Gullals. He had told her, too, how, sick and shaken with the fever their
negligence had bred, crippled by the loss of his pet clerk, and savagely angry
at the desolation in his charge, he had once damned the collective eyes of his
"intelligent local board" for a set of haramzadas. Which act of "brutal and
tyrannous oppression" won him a Reprimand Royal from the Bengal Government;
but in the anecdote as amended for Northern consumption we find no record of
this. Hence we are forced to conclude that Mrs. Hauksbee "edited" his
reminiscences before sowing them in idle ears, ready, as she well knew, to
exaggerate good or evil. And Otis Yeere bore himself as befitted the hero of
many tales.
"You can talk to me when you don't fall into a brown study. Talk now, and talk
your brightest and best," said Mrs. Hauksbee.
Otis needed no spur. Look to a man who has the counsel of a woman of or above
the world to back him. So long as he keeps his head, he can meet both sexes on
equal ground--an advantage never intended by Providence, who fashioned Man on
one day and Woman on another, in sign that neither should know more than a
very little of the other's life. Such a man goes far, or, the counsel being
withdrawn, collapses suddenly while his world seeks the reason.
Generalled by Mrs. Hauksbee who, again, had all Mrs. Mallowe's wisdom at her
disposal, proud of himself and, in the end, believing in himself because he
was believed in, Otis Yeere stood ready for any fortune that might befall,
certain that it would be good. He would fight for his own hand, and intended
that this second struggle should lead to better issue than the first helpless
surrender of the bewildered 'Stunt.
What might have happened, it is impossible to say. This lamentable thing
befell, bred directly by a statement of Mrs. Hauksbee that she would spend the
next season in Darjiling.
"Are you certain of that?" said Otis Yeere.
"Quite. We're writing about a house now.
Otis Yeere "stopped dead," as Mrs. Hauksbee put it in discussing the relapse
with Mrs. Mallowe.
"He has behaved," she said, angrily, "just like Captain Kerrington's pony--
only Otis is a donkey--at the last Gymkhana. Planted his forefeet and refused
to go on another step. Polly, my man's going to disappoint me. What shall I
do?"
As a rule, Mrs. Mallowe does not approve of staring, but on this occasion she
opened her eyes to the utmost.
"You have managed cleverly so far," she said. "Speak to him, and ask him what
he means."
'I will--at tonight's dance."
"No-o, not at a dance," said Mrs. Mallowe, cautiously. "Men are never
themselves quite at dances. Better wait till tomorrow morning."
"Nonsense. If he's going to revert in this insane way, there isn't a day to
lose. Are you going? No? Then sit up for me, there's a dear. I shan't stay
longer than supper under any circumstances."
Mrs. Mallowe waited through the evening, looking long and earnestly into the
fire, and sometimes smiling to herself.
* * * *
"Oh! oh! oh! The man's an idiot! A raving, positive idiot! I'm sorry I ever
saw him!"
Mrs. Hauksbee burst into Mrs. Mallowe's house, at midnight, almost in tears.
"What in the world has happened?" said Mrs. Mallowe, but her eyes showed that
she had guessed an answer.
"Happened! Everything has happened! He was there. I went to him and said,
'Now, what does this nonsense mean?' Don't laugh, dear, I can't bear it. But
you know what I mean I said. Then it was a square, and I sat it out with him
and wanted an explanation, and he said--Oh! I haven't patience with such
idiots! You know what I said about going to Darjiling next year? It doesn't
matter to me where I go. I'd have changed the Station and lost the rent to
have saved this. He said, in so many words, that he wasn't going to try to
work up any more, because--because he would be shifted into a province away
from Darjiling, and his own District, where these creatures are, is within a
day's journey"--
"Ah-hh!" said Mrs. Mallowe, in a tone of one who has successfully tracked an
obscure word through a large dictionary.
"Did you ever hear of anything so mad--so absurd? And he had the ball at his
feet. He had only to kick it! I would have made him anything! Anything in the
wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I
made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything
to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this
lunacy that spoiled everything!"
"Very few men understand your devotion thoroughly."
"Oh, Polly, don't laugh at me! I give men up from this hour. I could have
killed him then and there. What right had this man--this Thing I had picked
out of his filthy paddy-fields--to make love to me?"
"He did that, did he?"
"He did. I don't remember half he said, I was so angry. Oh, but such a funny
thing happened! I can't help laughing at it now, though I felt nearly ready to
cry with rage. He raved and I stormed--I'm afraid we must have made an awful
noise in our kala juggah. Protect my character, dear, if it's all over Simla
by tomorrow--and then he bobbed forward in the middle of this insanity--I
firmly believe the man's demented--and kissed me!"
"Morals above reproach," purred Mrs. Mallowe.
"So they were--so they are! It was the most absurd kiss. I don't believe he'd
ever kissed a woman in his life before. I threw my head back, and it was a
sort of slidy, pecking dab, just on the end of the chin--here." Mrs. Hauksbee
tapped her masculine little chin with her fan. "Then, of course, I was
furiously angry, and told him that he was no gentleman, and I was sorry I'd
ever met him, and so on. He was crushed so easily that I couldn't be very
angry. Then I came away straight to you."
"Was this before or after supper?"
"Oh! before--oceans before. Isn't it perfectly disgusting?"
"Let me think. I withhold judgment till tomorrow. Morning brings counsel."
But morning brought only a servant with a dainty bouquet of Annandale roses
for Mrs. Hauksbee to wear at the dance at Viceregal Lodge that night.
"He doesn't seem to be very penitent," said Mrs. Mallowe. "What's the billet-
doux in the centre?"
Mrs. Hauksbee opened the neatly folded note,--another accomplishment that she
had taught Otis,--read it, and groaned tragically.
"Last wreck of a feeble intellect! Poetry! Is it his own, do you think? Oh,
that I ever built my hopes on such a maudlin idiot!"
"No. It's a quotation from Mrs. Browning, and, in view of the facts of the
case, as Jack says, uncommonly well chosen. Listen:
"'Sweet thou has trod on a heart--
Pass! There's a world full of men
And women as fair as thou art,
Must do such things now and then.
"'Thou only hast stepped unaware--
Malice not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there,
In the way of a fair woman's foot?'
"I didn't--I didn't--I didn't! " said Mrs. Hauksbee, angrily, her eyes filling
with tears; "there was no malice at all. Oh, it's too vexatious!"
"You've misunderstood the compliment," said Mrs. Mallowe. "He clears you
completely and--ahem--I should think by this, that he has cleared completely
too. My experience of men is that when they begin to quote poetry, they are
going to flit. Like swans singing before they die, you know."
'Polly, you take my sorrows in a most unfeeling way."
"Do I?" Is it so terrible? If he's hurt your vanity, I should say that you've
done a certain amount of damage to his heart."
"Oh, you never can tell about a man! said Mrs. Hauksbee, with deep scorn.
* * * * *
Reviewing the matter as an impartial outsider, it strikes me that I'm about
the only person who has profited by the education of Otis Yeere. It comes to
twenty-seven pages and bittock.
AT THE PIT'S MOUTH
Men say it was a stolen tide--
The Lord that sent it he knows all,
But in mine ear will aye abide
The message that the bells let fall,
And awesome bells they were to me,
That in the dark rang, "Enderby."
--Jean Ingelow.
Once upon a time there was a man and his Wife and a Tertium Quid.
All three were unwise, but the Wife was the unwisest. The Man should have
looked after his Wife, who should have avoided the Tertium Quid, who, again,
should have married a wife of his own, after clean and open flirtations, to
which nobody can possibly object, round Jakko or Observatory Hill. When you
see a young man with his pony in a white lather, and his hat on the back of
his head flying down-hill at fifteen miles an hour to meet a girl who will be
properly surprised to meet him, you naturally approve of that young man, and
wish him Staff Appointments, and take an interest in his welfare, and, as the
proper time comes, give them sugar-tongs or side-saddles, according to your
means and generosity.
The Tertium Quid flew down-hill on horseback, but it was to meet the Man's
Wife; and when he flew up-hill it was for the same end. The Man was in the
Plains, earning money for his Wife to spend on dresses and four-hundred-rupee
bracelets, and inexpensive luxuries of that kind. He worked very hard, and
sent her a letter or a post-card daily. She also wrote to him daily, and said
that she was longing for him to come up to Simla. The Tertium Quid used to
lean over her shoulder and laugh as she wrote the notes. Then the two would
ride to the Post Office together.
Now, Simla is a strange place and its customs are peculiar; nor is any man who
has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to pass judgment on
circumstantial evidence. which is the most untrustworthy in the Courts. For
these reasons, and for others which need not appear, I decline to state
positively whether there was anything irretrievably wrong in the relations
between the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid. If there was, and hereon you must
form your own opinion, it was the Man's Wife's fault. She was kittenish in her
manners, wearing generally an air of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was
deadly learned and evil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped,
men saw this, shuddered and almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular,
and the least particular men are always the most exacting.
Simla is eccentric in its fashion of tearing friendships. Certain attachments
which have set and crystallized through half a dozen seasons acquire almost
the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as such. Again, certain
attachments equally old, and, to all appearance, equally venerable, never seem
to win any recognized official status; while a chance-sprung acquaintance now
two months born, steps into the place which by right belongs to the senior.
There is no law reducible to print which regulates these affairs.
Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, and others
have not. The Man's Wife had not. If she looked over the garden wall, for
instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. She complained
pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her own friends. When she put
up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed over it and under her eyebrows at
you as she said this thing, you felt that she had been infamously misjudged,
and that all the other women's instincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She
was not allowed to own the Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely
constructed that she would not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted.
She preferred some semblance of intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace
actions.
After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then Summer Hill,
then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly up and down the Cart Road
as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk, she said to the Tertium Quid, "Frank,
people say we are too much together, and people are so horrid."
The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid people were
unworthy of the consideration of nice people.
"But they have done more than talk--they have written--written to my hubby--
I'm sure of it," said the Man's Wife, and she pulled a letter from her husband
out of her saddle-pocket and gave it to the Tertium Quid.
It was an honest letter, written by an honest man, then stewing in the Plains
on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife eight hundred and
fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It is said that, perhaps,
she had no thought of the unwisdom of allowing her name to be so generally
coupled with the Tertium Quid's; that she was too much of a child to
understand the dangers of that sort of thing; that he, her husband, was the
last man in the world to interfere jealously with her little amusements and
interests, but that it would be better were she to drop the Tertium Quid
quietly and for her husband's sake. The letter was sweetened with many pretty
little pet names, and it amused the Tertium Quid considerably. He and She
laughed over it, so that you, fifty yards away, could see their shoulders
shaking while the horses slouched along side by side.
Their conversation was not worth reporting. The upshot of it was that, next
day, no one saw the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid together. They had both
gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a rule, is only visited officially by the
inhabitants of Simla.
A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding, and the coffin
creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of the most depressing
things on this earth, particularly when the procession passes under the wet,
dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe Hotel, where the sun is shut out and all the
hill streams are wailing and weeping together as they go down the valleys
Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and are transferred
so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead have no friends--only
acquaintances who are far too busy amusing themselves up the hill to attend to
old partners. The idea of using a Cemetery as a rendezvous is distinctly a
feminine one. A man would have said simply "Let people talk. We'll go down the
Mall." A woman is made differently, especially if she be such a woman as the
Man's Wife. She and the Tertium Quid enjoyed each other's society among the
graves of men and women whom they had known and danced with aforetime.
They used to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to the
left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground and where the
occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not ready. Each well-
regulated India Cemetery keeps half a dozen graves permanently open for
contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these are more
usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and sick from the
Plains often succumb to the effects of the Rains in the Hills or get pneumonia
from their ayahs taking them through damp pine-woods after the sun has set. In
Cantonments, of course, the man's size is more in request; these arrangements
varying with the climate and population.
One day when the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in the
Cemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground. They had marked out a full-
size grave, and the Tertium Quid asked them whether any Sahib was sick. They
said that they did not know; but it was an order that they should dig a
Sahib's grave.
"Work away," said the Tertium Quid, "and let's see how it's done."
The coolies worked away, and the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid watched and
talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened Then a coolie,
taking the earth in blankets as it was thrown up, jumped over the grave.
"That's queer," said the Tertium Quid. "Where's my ulster?"
"What's queer?" said the Man's Wife.
"I have got a chill down my back just as if a goose had walked over my grave."
"Why do you look at the thing, then?" said the Man's Wife. "Let us go."
The Tertium Quid stood at the head of the grave, and stared without answering
for a space. Then he said, dropping a pebble down, "It is nasty and cold;
horribly cold. I don't think I shall come to the Cemetery any more. I don't
think grave-digging is cheerful."
The two talked and agreed that the Cemetery was depressing. They also arranged
for a ride next day out from the Cemetery through the Mashobra Tunnel up to
Fagoo and back, because all the world was going to a garden-party at Viceregal
Lodge, and all the people of Mashobra would go too.
Coming up the Cemetery road, the Tertium Quid's horse tried to bolt up hill,
being tired with standing so long, and managed to strain a back sinew.
"I shall have to take the mare tomorrow," said the Tertium Quid, "and she will
stand nothing heavier than a snaffle."
They made their arrangements to meet in the Cemetery, after allowing all the
Mashobra people time to pass into Simla. That night it rained heavily, and
next day, when the Tertium Quid came to the trysting-place, he saw that the
new grave had a foot of water in it, the ground being a tough and sour clay.
"'Jove! That looks beastly," said the Tertium Quid. "Fancy being boarded up
and dropped into that well!"
They then started off to Fagoo, the mare playing with the snaffle and picking
her way as though she were shod with satin, and the sun shining divinely. The
road below Mashobra to Fagoo is officially styled the Himalayan-Thibet Road;
but in spite of its name it is not much more than six feet wide in most
places, and the drop into the valley below must be anything between one and
two thousand feet.
"Now we're going to Thibet," said the Man's Wife merrily, as the horses drew
near to Fagoo. She was riding on the cliff-side.
"Into Thibet," said the Tertium Quid, "ever so far from people who say horrid
things, and hubbies who write stupid letters. With you--to the end of the
world!"
A coolie carrying a log of wood came round a corner, and the mare went wide to
avoid him--forefeet in and haunches out, as a sensible mare should go.
"To the world's end," said the Man's Wife, and looked unspeakable things over
her near shoulder at the Tertium Quid.
He was smiling, but, while she looked, the smile froze stiff as it were on his
face, and changed to a nervous grin--the sort of grin men wear when they are
not quite easy in their saddles. The mare seemed to be sinking by the stem,
and her nostrils cracked while she was trying to realize what was happening.
The rain of the night before had rotted the drop-side of the Himalayan-Thibet
Road, and it was giving way under her. "What are you doing?" said the Man's
Wife. The Tertium Quid gave no answer. He grinned nervously and set his spurs
into the mare, who rapped with her forefeet on the road, and the struggle
began. The Man's Wife screamed, "Oh, Frank, get off!"
But the Tertium Quid was glued to the saddle--his face blue and white--and he
looked into the Man's Wife's eyes. Then the Man's Wife clutched at the mare's
head and caught her by the nose instead of the bridle. The brute threw up her
head and went down with a scream, the Tertium Quid upon her, and the nervous
grin still set on his face.
The Man's Wife heard the tinkle-tinkle of little stones and loose earth
falling off the roadway, and the sliding roar of the man and horse going down.
Then everything was quiet, and she called on Frank to leave his mare and walk
up. But Frank did not answer. He was underneath the mare, nine hundred feet
below, spoiling a patch of Indian corn.
As the revellers came hack from Viceregal Lodge in the mists of the evening,
they met a temporarily insane woman, on a temporarily mad horse, swinging
round the corners, with her eyes and her mouth open, and her head like the
head of the Medusa. She was stopped by a man at the risk of his life, and
taken out of the saddle, a limp heap, and put on the bank to explain herself.
This wasted twenty minutes, and then she was sent home in a lady's 'rickshaw,
still with her mouth open and her hands picking at her riding-gloves.
She was in bed through the following three days, which were rainy; so she
missed attending the funeral of the Tertium Quid, who was lowered into
eighteen inches of water, instead of the twelve to which he had first
objected.
A WAYSIDE COMEDY
Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery
of man is great upon him.
--Eccles. viii. 6.
Fate and the Government of India have turned the Station of Kashima into a
prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now lying
there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government of India may
be moved to scatter the European population to the four winds.
Kashima is bound on all sides by the rock-tipped circle of the Dosehri hills.
In Spring, it is ablaze with roses; in Summer, the roses die and the hot winds
blow from the hills; in Autumn, the white mists from the hills cover the place
as with water; and in Winter the frosts nip everything young and tender to
earth-level. There is but one view in Kashima--a stretch of perfectly flat
pasture and plough-land, running up to the grey-blue scrub of the Dosehri
hills.
There are no amusements, except snipe and tiger shooting; but the tigers have
been long since hunted from their lairs in the rock-caves, and the snipe only
come once a year. Narkarra--one hundred and forty-three miles by road--is the
nearest station to Kashima. But Kashima never goes to Narkarra, where there
are at least twelve English people. It stays within the circle of the Dosehri
hills.
All Kashima acquits Mrs. Vansuythen of any intention to do harm; but all
Kashima knows that she, and she alone, brought about their pain.
Boulte, the Engineer, Mrs. Boulte, and Captain Kurrell know this. They are the
English population of Kashima, if we except Major Vansuythen, who is of no
importance whatever, and Mrs. Vansuythen, who is the most important of all.
You must remember, though you will not understand, that all laws weaken in a
small and hidden community where there is no public opinion. When a man is
absolutely alone in a Station he runs a certain risk of falling into evil
ways. The risk is multiplied by every addition to the population up to twelve-
-the Jury-number. After that, fear and consequent restraint begin, and human
action becomes less grotesquely jerky.
There was deep peace in Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a
charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In
spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she
cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or
stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a
fair woman, with very still grey eyes, the color of a lake just before the
light of the sun touches it. No man who had seen those eyes, could, later on,
explain what fashion of woman she was to look upon. The eyes dazzled him. Her
own sex said that she was "not bad looking, but spoiled by pretending to be so
grave." And yet her gravity was natural It was not her habit to smile. She
merely went through life, looking at those who passed; and the women objected
while the men fell down and worshipped.
She knows and is deeply sorry for the evil she has done to Kashima; but Major
Vansuythen cannot understand why Mrs. Boulte does not drop in to afternoon tea
at least three times a week. "When there are only two women in one Station,
they ought to see a great deal of each other," says Major Vansuythen.
Long and long before ever Mrs. Vansuythen came out of those far-away places
where there is society and amusement, Kurrell had discovered that Mrs. Boulte
was the one woman in the world for him and--you dare not blame them. Kashima
was as out of the world as Heaven or the Other Place, and the Dosehri hills
kept their secret well. Boulte had no concern in the matter. He was in camp
for a fortnight at a time. He was a hard, heavy man, and neither Mrs. Boulte
nor Kurrell pitied him. They had all Kashima and each other for their very,
very own; and Kashima was the Garden of Eden in those days. When Boulte
returned from his wanderings he would slap Kurrell between the shoulders and
call him "old fellow," and the three would dine together. Kashima was happy
then when the judgment of God seemed almost as distant as Narkarra or the
railway that ran down to the sea. But the Government sent Major Vansuythen to
Kashima, and with him came his wife.
The etiquette of Kashima is much the same as that of a desert island. When a
stranger is cast away there, all hands go down to the shore to make him
welcome. Kashima assembled at the masonry platform close to the Narkarra Road,
and spread tea for the Vansuythens. That ceremony was reckoned a formal call,
and made them free of the Station, its rights and privileges. When the
Vansuythens were settled down, they gave a tiny housewarming to all Kashima;
and that made Kashima free of their house, according to the immemorial usage
of the Station.
Then the Rains came, when no one could go into camp, and the Narkarra Road was
washed away by the Kasun River, and in the cup-like pastures of Kashima the
cattle waded knee-deep. The clouds dropped down from the Dosehri hills and
covered everything.
At the end of the Rains, Boulte's manner toward his wife changed and became
demonstratively affectionate. They had been married twelve years, and the
change startled Mrs. Boulte, who hated her husband with the hate of a woman
who has met with nothing but kindness from her mate, and, in the teeth of this
kindness, had done him a great wrong. Moreover, she had her own trouble to
fight with--her watch to keep over her own property, Kurrell. For two months
the Rains had hidden the Dosehri hills and many other things besides; but when
they lifted, they showed Mrs. Boulte that her man among men, her Ted--for she
called him Ted in the old days when Boulte was out of earshot--was slipping
the links of the allegiance.
"The Vansuythen Woman has taken him," Mrs. Boulte said to herself; and when
Boulte was away, wept over her belief, in the face of the over-vehement
blandishments of Ted. Sorrow in Kashima is as fortunate as Love, because there
is nothing to weaken it save the flight of Time. Mrs. Boulte had never
breathed her suspicion to Kurrell because she was not certain; and her nature
led her to be very certain before she took steps in any direction. That is why
she behaved as she did.
Boulte came into the house one evening, and leaned against the door-posts of
the drawing-room, chewing his moustache. Mrs. Boulte was putting some flowers
into a vase. There is a pretence of civilization even in Kashima.
"Little woman," said Boulte, quietly, "do you care for me?"
"Immensely," said she, with a laugh. "Can you ask it?"
"But I'm serious," said Boulte. "Do you care for me?"
Mrs. Boulte dropped the flowers, and turned round quickly. "Do you want an
honest answer?"
"Ye-es, I've asked for it."
Mrs. Boulte spoke in a low, even voice for five minutes, very distinctly, that
there might be no misunderstanding her meaning. When Samson broke the pillars
of Gaza, he did a little thing, and one not to be compared to the deliberate
pulling down of a woman's homestead about her own ears. There was no wise
female friend to advise Mrs. Boulte, the singularly cautious wife, to hold her
hand. She struck at Boulte's heart, because her own was sick with suspicion of
Kurrell, and worn out with the long strain of watching alone through the
Rains. There was no plan or purpose in her speaking. The sentences made
themselves; and Boulte listened leaning against the door-post with his hands
in his pockets. When all was over, and Mrs. Boulte began to breathe through
her nose before breaking out into tears, he laughed and stared straight in
front of him at the Dosehri hills.
"Is that all?" be said. "Thanks, I only wanted to know, you know."
"What are you going to do?" said the woman, between her sobs.
"Do! Nothing. What should I do? Kill Kurrell or send you Home, or apply for
leave to get a divorce? It's two days' dak into Narkarra." He laughed again
and went on: "I'll tell you what you can do. You can ask Kurrell to dinner
tomorrow--no, on Thursday, that will allow you time to pack--and you can bolt
with him. I give you my word I won't follow."
He took up his helmet and went out of the room, and Mrs. Boulte sat till the
moonlight streaked the floor, thinking and thinking and thinking. She had done
her best upon the spur of the moment to pull the house down; but it would not
fall. Moreover, she could not understand her husband, and she was afraid. Then
the folly of her useless truthfulness struck her, and she was ashamed to write
to Kurrell, saying: "I have gone mad and told everything. My husband says that
I am free to elope with you. Get a dak for Thursday, and we will fly after
dinner." There was a cold-bloodedness about that procedure which did not
appeal to her. So she sat still in her own house and thought.
At dinner-time Boulte came back from his walk, white and worn and haggard, and
the woman was touched at his distress. As the evening wore on, she muttered
some expression of sorrow, something approaching to contrition. Boulte came
out of a brown study and said, "Oh, that! I wasn't thinking about that. By the
way, what does Kurrell say to the elopement?"
"I haven't seen him," said Mrs. Boulte. "Good God! is that all?"
But Boulte was not listening, and her sentence ended in a gulp.
The next day brought no comfort to Mrs. Boulte, for Kurrell did not appear,
and the new life that she, in the five minutes' madness of the previous
evening, had hoped to build out of the ruins of the old, seemed to be no
nearer.
Boulte ate his breakfast, advised her to see her Arab pony fed in the veranda,
and went out. The morning wore through, and at midday the tension became
unendurable. Mrs. Boulte could not cry. She had finished her crying in the
night, and now she did not want to be left alone. Perhaps the Vansuythen woman
would talk to her; and, since talking opens the heart, perhaps there might be
some comfort to be found in her company. She was the only other woman in the
Station.
In Kashima there are no regular calling-hours. Every one can drop in upon
every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked
across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two
compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the
gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed
through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the
drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying--"But on my Honor! On my Soul
and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I
would have told you then if Vansuythen hadn't been with you. If it is for her
sake that you'll have nothing to say to me, you can make your mind easy. It's
Kurrell'
"What?" said Mrs. Vansuythen, with an hysterical little laugh. "Kurrell! Oh,
it can't be. You two must have made some horrible mistake. Perhaps you--you
lost your temper, or misunderstood, or something. Things can't be as wrong as
you say."
Mrs. Vansuythen had shifted her defence to avoid the man's pleading, and was
desperately trying to keep him to a side-issue.
"There must be some mistake," she insisted, "and it can be all put right
again."
Boulte laughed grimly.
"It can't be Captain Kurrell! He told me that he had never taken the least--
the least interest in your wife, Mr. Boulte. Oh, do listen! He said he had
not. He swore he had not," said Mrs. Vansuythen.
The purdah rustled, and the speech was cut short by the entry of a little,
thin woman with big rings round her eyes. Mrs. Vansuythen stood up with a
gasp.
"What was that you said?" asked Mrs. Boulte. "Never mind that man. What did
Ted say to you? What did he say to you? What did he say to you?"
Mrs. Vansuythen sat down helplessly on the sofa, overborne by the trouble of
her questioner.
"He said--I can't remember exactly what he said--but I understood him to say--
that is--But, really, Mrs. Boulte, isn't it rather a strange question?"
"Will you tell me what he said?" repeated Mrs. Boulte.
Even a tiger will fly before a bear robbed of her whelps, and Mrs. Vansuythen
was only an ordinarily good woman. She began in a sort of desperation: "Well,
he said that he never cared for you at all, and, of course, there was not the
least reason why he should have, and--and--that was all."
"You said he swore he had not cared for me. Was that true?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Vansuythen, very softly.
Mrs. Boulte wavered for an instant where she stood, and then fell forward
fainting.
"What did I tell you?" said Boulte, as though the conversation had been
unbroken. "You can see for yourself she cares for him." The light began to
break into his dull mind, and he went on--"And he--what was he saying to you?"
But Mrs. Vansuythen, with no heart for explanations or impassioned
protestations, was kneeling over Mrs. Boulte.
"Oh, you brute!" she cried. "Are all men like this? Help me to get her into my
room--and her face is cut against the table. Oh, will you be quiet, and help
me to carry her? I hate you, and I hate Captain Kurrell. Lift her up carefully
and now--go! Go away!"
Boulte carried his wife into Mrs. Vansuythen's bedroom and departed before the
storm of that lady's wrath and disgust, impenitent and burning with jealousy.
Kurrell had been making love to Mrs. Vansuythen--would do Vansuythen as great
a wrong as he had done Boulte, who caught himself considering whether Mrs.
Vansuythen would faint if she discovered that the man she loved had foresworn
her.
In the middle of these meditations, Kurrell came cantering along the road and
pulled up with a cheery, "Good mornin'. 'Been mashing Mrs. Vansuythen as
usual, eh? Bad thing for a sober, married man, that. What will Mrs Boulte
say?"
Boulte raised his head and said, slowly, "Oh, you liar!"
Kurrell's face changed. "What's that?" he asked, quickly.
"Nothing much," said Boulte. "Has my wife told you that you two are free to go
off whenever you please? She has been good enough to explain the situation to
me. You've been a true friend to me, Kurrell--old man--haven't you?"
Kurrell groaned, and tried to frame some sort of idiotic sentence about being
willing to give "satisfaction." But his interest in the woman was dead, had
died out in the Rains, and, mentally, he was abusing her for her amazing
indiscretion. It would have been so easy to have broken off the thing gently
and by degrees, and now he was saddled with--Boulte's voice recalled him.
"I don't think I should get any satisfaction from killing you, and I'm pretty
sure you'd get none from killing me."
Then in a querulous tone, ludicrously disproportioned to his wrongs, Boulte
added--"'Seems rather a pity that you haven't the decency to keep to the
woman, now you've got her. You've been a true friend to her too, haven't you?"
Kurrell stared long and gravely. The situation was getting beyond him.
"What do you mean?" he said.
Boulte answered, more to himself than the questioner: 'My wife came over to
Mrs. Vansuythen's just now; and it seems you'd been telling Mrs. Vansuythen
that you'd never cared for Emma. I suppose you lied, as usual. What had Mrs.
Vansuythen to do with you, or you with her? Try to speak the truth for once in
a way."
Kurrell took the double insult without wincing, and replied by another
question: "Go on. What happened?"
"Emma fainted," said Boulte, simply. "But, look here, what had you been saying
to Mrs. Vansuythen?"
Kurrell laughed. Mrs. Boulte had, with unbridled tongue, made havoc of his
plans; and he could at least retaliate by hurting the man in whose eyes he was
humiliated and shown dishonorable.
"Said to her? What does a man tell a lie like that for? I suppose I said
pretty much what you've said, unless I'm a good deal mistaken."
"I spoke the truth," said Boulte, again more to himself than Kurrell. "Emma
told me she hated me. She has no right in me."
"No! I suppose not. You're only her husband, y'know. And what did Mrs.
Vansuythen say after you had laid your disengaged heart at her feet?"
Kurrell felt almost virtuous as he put the question.
"I don't think that matters," Boulte replied; "and it doesn't concern you."
"But it does! I tell you it does" began Kurrell, shamelessly.
The sentence was cut by a roar of laughter from Boulte's lips. Kurrell was
silent for an instant, and then he, too, laughed--laughed long and loudly,
rocking in his saddle. It was an unpleasant sound--the mirthless mirth of
these men on the long, white line of the Narkarra Road. There were no
strangers in Kashima, or they might have thought that captivity within the
Dosehri hills had driven half the European population mad. The laughter ended
abruptly, and Kurrell was the first to speak.
"Well, what are you going to do?"
Boulte looked up the road, and at the hills. "Nothing," said he, quietly;
"what's the use? It's too ghastly for anything. We must let the old life go
on. I can only call you a hound and a liar, and I can't go on calling you
names forever. Besides which, I don't feel that I'm much better. We can't get
out of this place. What is there to do?"
Kurrell looked round the rat-pit of Kashima and made no reply. The injured
husband took up the wondrous tale.
"Ride on, and speak to Emma if you want to. God knows I don't care what you
do."
He walked forward and left Kurrell gazing blankly after him. Kurrell did not
ride on either to see Mrs. Boulte or Mrs. Vansuythen. He sat in his saddle and
thought, while his pony grazed by the roadside.
The whir of approaching wheels roused him. Mrs. Vansuythen was driving home
Mrs. Boulte, white and wan, with a cut on her forehead.
"Stop, please," said Mrs. Boulte "I want to speak to Ted."
Mrs. Vansuythen obeyed, but as Mrs. Boulte leaned forward, putting her hand
upon the splash-board of the dog-cart, Kurrell spoke.
"I've seen your husband, Mrs. Boulte.
There was no necessity for any further explanation. The man's eyes were fixed,
not upon Mrs. Boulte, but her companion. Mrs. Boulte saw the look.
"Speak to him!" she pleaded, turning to the woman at her side. "Oh, speak to
him! Tell him what you told me just now. Tell him you hate him. Tell him you
hate him!"
She bent forward and wept bitterly, while the sais, impassive, went forward to
hold the horse. Mrs. Vansuythen turned scarlet and dropped the reins. She
wished to be no party to such unholy explanations.
"I've nothing to do with it," she began, coldly; but Mrs. Boulte's sobs
overcame her, and she addressed herself to the man. "I don't know what I am to
say, Captain Kurrell. I don't know what I can call you. I think you've--you've
behaved abominably, and she has cut her forehead terribly against the table."
"It doesn't hurt. It isn't anything," said Mrs. Boulte feebly. "That doesn't
matter. Tell him what you told me. Say you don't care for him. Oh, Ted, won't
you believe her?"
"Mrs. Boulte has made me understand that you were--that you were fond of her
once upon a time," went on Mrs. Vansuythen.
"Well!" said Kurrell brutally. "It seems to me that Mrs. Boulte had better be
fond of her own husband first."
"Stop!" said Mrs. Vansuythen. "Hear me first. I don't care--I don't want to
know anything about you and Mrs. Boulte; but I want you to know that I hate
you, that I think you are a cur, and that I'll never, never speak to you
again. Oh, I don't dare to say what I think of you, you--man!
_Sais,_gorah_ko_jane_do_."
"I want to speak to Ted," moaned Mrs. Boulte, but the dog-cart rattled on, and
Kurrell was left on the road, shamed, and boiling with wrath against Mrs.
Boulte.
He waited till Mrs. Vansuythen was driving back to her own house, and, she
being freed from the embarrassment of Mrs. Boulte's presence, learned for the
second time her opinion of himself and his actions.
In the evenings, it was the wont of all Kashima to meet at the platform on the
Narkarra Road, to drink tea, and discuss the trivialities of the day. Major
Vansuythen and his wife found themselves alone at the gathering-place for
almost the first time in their remembrance; and the cheery Major, in the teeth
of his wife's remarkably reasonable suggestion that the rest of the Station
might be sick, insisted upon driving round to the two bungalows and unearthing
the population.
"Sitting in the twilight!" said he, with great indignation to the Boultes.
That'll never do! Hang it all, we're one family here! You must come out, and
so must Kurrell. I'll make him bring his banjo." So great is the power of
honest simplicity and a good digestion over guilty consciences that all
Kashima did turn out, even down to the banjo; and the Major embraced the
company in one expansive grin. As he grinned, Mrs. Vansuythen raised her eyes
for an instant and looked at all Kashima. Her meaning was clear. Major
Vansuythen would never know anything. He was to be the outsider in that happy
family whose cage was the Dosehri hills.
"You're singing villainously out of tune, Kurrell," said the Major,
truthfully. "Pass me that banjo."
And he sang in excruciating-wise till the stars came out and all Kashima went
to dinner.
* * * * *
That was the beginning of the New Life of Kashima--the life that Mrs. Boulte
made when her tongue was loosened in the twilight.
Mrs. Vansuythen has never told the Major; and since be insists upon keeping up
a burdensome geniality, she has been compelled to break her vow of not
speaking to Kurrell. This speech, which must of necessity preserve the
semblance of politeness and interest, serves admirably to keep alive the flame
of jealousy and dull hatred in Boulte's bosom, as it awakens the same passions
in his wife's heart. Mrs. Boulte hates Mrs. Vansuythen because she has taken
Ted from her, and, in some curious fashion, hates her because Mrs. Vansuythen-
-and here the wife's eyes see far more clearly than the husband's--detests
Ted. And Ted--that gallant captain and honorable man--knows now that it is
possible to hate a woman once loved, to the verge of wishing to silence her
forever with blows. Above all, is he shocked that Mrs. Boulte cannot see the
error of her ways.
Boulte and he go out tiger-shooting together in all friendship. Boulte has put
their relationship on a most satisfactory footing.
"You're a blackguard," he says to Kurrell, "and I've lost any self-respect I
may ever have had; but when you're with me, I can feel certain that you are
not with Mrs. Vansuythen, or making Emma miserable."
Kurrell endures anything that Boulte may say to him. Sometimes they are away
for three days together, and then the Major insists upon his wife going over
to sit with Mrs, Boulte; although Mrs. Vansuythen has repeatedly de. dared
that she prefers her husband's company to any in the world. From the way in
which she clings to him, she would certainly seem to be speaking the truth.
But of course, as the Major says, "in a little Station we must all be
friendly."
THE HILL OF ILLUSION
What rendered vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled,
And bade between their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
--Matthew Arnold.
HE. Tell your jhampanis not to hurry so, dear. They forget I'm fresh from the
Plains.
SHE. Sure proof that I have not been going out with any one. Yes, they are an
untrained crew. Where do we go?
HE. As usual--to the world's end. No, Jakko.
SHE. Have your pony led after you, then. It's a long round.
HE. And for the last time, thank Heaven!
SHE. Do you mean that still? I didn't dare to write to you about it...all
these months.
HE. Mean it! I've been shaping my affairs to that end since Autumn. What makes
you speak as though it had occurred to you for the first time?
SHE. I! Oh! I don't know. I've had long enough to think, too.
HE. And you've changed your mind?
SHE. No. You ought to know that I am a miracle of constancy. What are your--
arrangements?
HE. Ours, Sweetheart, please.
SHE. Ours, be it then. My poor boy, how the prickly heat has marked your
forehead! Have you ever tried sulphate of copper in water?
HE. It'll go away in a day or two up here. The arrangements are simple enough.
Tonga in the early morning--reach Kalka at twelve--Umballa at seven--down,
straight by night train, to Bombay, and then the steamer of the 21st for Rome.
That's my idea. The Continent and Sweden--a ten-week honeymoon.
SHE. Ssh! Don't talk of it in that way. It makes me afraid. Guy, how long have
we two been insane?
HE. Seven months and fourteen days; I forget the odd hours exactly, but I'll
think.
SHE. I only wanted to see if you remembered. Who are those two on the
Blessington Road?
HE. Eabrey and the Penner woman. What do they matter to us? Tell me everything
that you've been doing and saying and thinking.
SHE. Doing little, saying less, and thinking a great deal. I've hardly been
out at all.
Ha. That was wrong of you. You haven't been moping?
SHE. Not very much. Can you wonder that I'm disinclined for amusement?
HE. Frankly, I do. Where was the difficulty?
SHE. In this only. The more people I know and the more I'm known here, the
wider spread will be the news of the crash when it comes. I don't like that.
HE. Nonsense. We shall be out of it.
SHE. You think so?
HE. I'm sure of it, if there is any power in steam or horse-flesh to carry us
away. Ha! ha!
SHE. And the fun of the situation comes in--where, my Lancelot?
HE. Nowhere, Guinevere. I was only thinking of something.
SHE. They say men have a keener sense of humor than women. Now _I_ was
thinking of the scandal.
HE. Don't think of anything so ugly. We shall be beyond it.
SHE. It will be there all the same in the mouths of Simla--telegraphed over
India, and talked of at the dinners--and when He goes out they will stare at
Him to see how He takes it. And we shall be dead, Guy dear--dead and cast into
the outer darkness where there is--
HE. Love at least. Isn't that enough?
SHE. I have said so.
HE. And you think so still?
SHE. What do you think?
Ha. What have I _done_? It means equal ruin to me, as the world reckons it--
outcasting, the loss of my appointment, the breaking of my life's work. I pay
my price.
SHE. And are you so much above the world that you can afford to pay it? Am I?
Ha. My Divinity--what else?
SHE. A very ordinary woman I'm afraid, but, so far, respectable. How'd you do,
Mrs. Middleditch? Your husband? I think he's riding down to Annandale with
Colonel Statters. Yes, isn't it divine after the rain?--Guy, how long am I to
be allowed to bow to Mrs. Middleditch? Till the 17th?
HE. Frowsy Scotchwoman? What is the use of bringing her into the discussion?
You were saying?
SHE. Nothing. Have you ever seen a man hanged?
HE. Yes. Once.
SHE. What was it for?
HE. Murder, of course.
SHE. Murder. Is that so great a sin after all? I wonder how he felt before the
drop fell.
HE. I don't think he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this
evening! You're shivering. Put on your cape, dear.
SHE. I think I will. Oh! Look at the mist coming over Sanjaoli; and I thought
we should have sunshine on the Ladies' Mile! Let's turn back.
HE. What's the good? There's a cloud on Elysium Hill, and that means it's
foggy all down the Mall. We'll go on. It'll blow away before we get to the
Convent, perhaps. 'Jove! It is chilly.
SHE. You feel it, fresh from below. Put on your ulster. What do you think of
my cape?
HE. Never ask a man his opinion of a woman's dress when he is desperately and
abjectly in love with the wearer. Let me look. Like everything else of yours
it's perfect. Where did you get it from?
SHE. He gave it me, on Wednesday...our wedding-day, you know.
HE. The deuce He did! He's growing generous in his old age. D'you like all
that frilly, bunchy stuff at the throat? I don't.
SHE. Don't you?
"Kind Sir, 0' your courtesy,
As you go by the town, Sir,
Pray you 0' your love for me,
Buy me a russet gown, Sir."
HE. I won't say: "Keek into the draw-well, Janet, Janet." Only wait a little,
darling, and you shall be stocked with russet gowns and everything else.
SHE. And when the frocks wear out, you'll get me new ones--and everything
else?
HE. Assuredly.
SHE. I wonder!
HE. Look here, Sweetheart, I didn't spend two days and two nights in the train
to hear you wonder. I thought we'd settled all that at Shaifazehat.
SHE (dreamily). At Shaifazehat? Does the Station go on still? That was ages
and ages ago. It must be crumbling to pieces. All except the Amirtollah kutcha
road. I don't believe that could crumble till the Day of Judgment.
Ha. You think so? What is the mood now?
SHE. I can't tell. How cold it is! Let us get on quickly.
Ha. Better walk a little. Stop your jhampanis and get out. What's the matter
with you this evening, dear?
SHE. Nothing. You must grow accustomed to my ways. If I'm boring you I can go
home. Here's Captain Congleton coming; I dare say he'll be willing to escort
me.
Ha. Goose! Between us, too! Damn Captain Congleton. There!
SHE. Chivalrous Knight! Is it your habit to swear much in talking? It jars a
little, and you might swear at me.
HE. My angel! I didn't know what I was saying; and you changed so quickly that
I couldn't follow. I'll apologize in dust and ashes.
SHE. There'll be enough of those later on. Good night, Captain Congleton.
Going to the singing-quadrilles already? What dances am I giving you next
week? No! You must have written them down wrong. Five and Seven, I said. If
you've made a mistake, I certainly don't intend to suffer for it. You must
alter your programme.
HE. I thought you told me that you bad not been going out much this season?
SHE. Quite true, but when I do I dance with Captain Congleton. He dances very
nicely.
HE. And sit out with him, I suppose?
SHE. Yes. Have you any objection? Shall I stand under the chandelier in
future?
HE. What does he talk to you about?
SHE. What do men talk about when they sit out?
Ha. Ugh! Don't! Well now I'm up, you must dispense with the fascinating
Congleton for a while. I don't like him.
SHE. (after a pause). Do you know what you have said?
HE. 'Can't say that I do exactly. I'm not in the best of tempers.
SHE. So I see...and feel. My true and faithful lover, where is your "eternal
constancy," "unalterable trust," and "reverent devotion"? I remember those
phrases; you seem to have forgotten them. I mention a man's name--
HE. A good deal more than that.
SHE. Well, speak to him about a dance--perhaps the last dance that I shall
ever dance in my life before I...before I go away; and you at once distrust
and insult me.
HE. I never said a word.
SHE. How much did you imply? Guy, is this amount of confidence to be our stock
to start the new life on?
HE. No, of course not. I didn't mean that. On my word of honor, I didn't. Let
it pass, dear. Please let it pass.
SHE. This once--yes--and a second time, and again and again, all through the
years when I shall be unable to resent it. You want too much, my Lancelot,
and...you know too much.
Hp. How do you mean?
SHE. That is a part of the punishment. There cannot be perfect trust between
us.
HE. In Heaven's name, why not?
SHE. Hush! The Other Place is quite enough. Ask yourself.
HE. I don't follow.
SHE. You trust me so implicitly that when I look at another man--Never mind,
Guy. Have you ever made love to a girl--a good girl?
HE. Something of the sort. Centuries ago--in the Dark Ages, before I ever met
you, dear.
SHE. Tell me what you said to her.
HE. What does a man say to a girl? I've forgotten.
SHE. I remember. He tells her that he trusts her and worships the ground she
walks on, and that he'll love and honor and protect her till her dying day;
and so she marries in that belief. At least, I speak of one girl who was not
protected.
HE. Well, and then?
SHE. And then, Guy, and then, that girl needs ten times the love and trust and
honor--yes, honor--that was enough when she was only a mere wife if--if--the
other life she chooses to lead is to be made even bearable. Do you understand?
HE. Even bearable! It'll he Paradise.
SHE. Ah! Can you give me all I've asked for--not now, nor a few months later,
but when you begin to think of what you might have done if you had kept your
own appointment and your caste here--when you begin to look upon me as a drag
and a burden? I shall want it most, then, Guy, for there will be no one in the
wide world but you.
HE. You're a little over-tired tonight, Sweetheart, and you're taking a stage
view of the situation. After the necessary business in the Courts, the road is
clear to--
SHE. "The holy state of matrimony!" Ha! ha! ha!
HE. Ssh! Don't laugh in that horrible way!
SHE. I-I c-c-c-can't help it! Isn't it too absurd! Ah! Ha! ha! ha! Guy, stop
me quick or I shall--l-l-laugh till we get to the Church.
HE. For goodness' sake, stop! Don't make an exhibition of yourself. What is
the matter with you?
SHE. N-nothing. I'm better now.
HE. That's all right. One moment, dear. There's a little wisp of hair got
loose from behind your right ear and it's straggling over your cheek. So!
SHE. Thank'oo. I'm 'fraid my hat's on one side, too.
HE. What do you wear these huge dagger bonnet-skewers for? They're big enough
to kill a man with.
SHE. Oh! Don't kill me, though. You're sticking it into my head! Let me do it.
You men are so clumsy.
HE. Have you had many opportunities of comparing us--in this sort of work?
SHE. Guy, what is my name?
HE. Eh! I don't follow.
SHE. Here's my cardcase. Can you read?
HE. Yes. Well?
SHE. Well, that answers your question. You know the other man's name. Am I
sufficiently humbled, or would you like to ask me if there is any one else?
HE. I see now. My darling, I never meant that for an instant. I was only
joking. There! Lucky there's no one on the road. They'd be scandalized.
SHE. They'll be more scandalized before the end.
HE. Do-on't! I don't like you to talk in that way.
SHE. Unreasonable man! Who asked me to face the situation and accept it? Tell
me, do I look like Mrs. Penner? Do I look like a naughty woman? Swear I don't!
Give me your word of honor, my honorable friend, that I'm not like Mrs.
Buzgago. That's the way she stands, with her hands clasped at the back of her
head. D'you like that?
HE. Don't be affected.
SHE. I'm not. I'm Mrs. Buzgago. Listen!
Pendant une anne' toute entiere
Le regiment n'a pas r'paru.
Au Ministere de la Guerre
On le r'porta comme perdu.
On se r'noncait a r'trouver sa trace,
Quand un matin subitement,
On le vit r'paraitre sur la place
L'Colonel toujours en avant.
That's the way she rolls her r's. Am I like her?
HE. No, but I object when you go on like an actress and sing stuff of that
kind. Where in the world did you pick up the Chanson du Colonel? It isn't a
drawing-room song. It isn't proper.
SHE. Mrs. Buzgago taught it me. She is both drawing-room and proper, and in
another month she'll shut her drawing-room to me, and thank God she isn't as
improper as I am. Oh, Guy, Guy! I wish I was like some women and had no
scruples about--what is it Keene says?--"Wearing a corpse's hair and being
false to the bread they eat."
HE. I am only a man of limited intelligence, and just now, very bewildered.
When you have quite finished flashing through all your moods tell me, and I'll
try to understand the last one.
SHE. Moods, Guy! I haven't any. I'm sixteen years old and you're just twenty,
and you've been waiting for two hours outside the school in the cold. And now
I've met you, and now we're walking home together. Does that suit you, My
Imperial Majesty?
HE. No. We aren't children. Why can't you be rational?
SHE. He asks me that when I'm going to commit suicide for his sake, and, and--
I don't want to be French and rave about my mother, but have I ever told you
that I have a mother, and a brother who was my pet before I married? He's
married now. Can't you imagine the pleasure that the news of the elopement
will give him? Have you any people at Home, Guy, to be pleased with your
performances?
HE. One or two. One can't make omelets without breaking eggs.
SHE (slowly). I don't see the necessity--
HE. Hah! What do you mean?
SHE. Shall I speak the truth?
HE. Under the circumstances, perhaps it would be as well.
SHE. Guy, I'm afraid.
HE. I thought we'd settled all that. What of?
SHE. Of you.
HE. Oh, damn it all! The old business! This is too had!
SHE. Of you.
HE. And what now?
SHE. What do you think of me?
HE. Beside the question altogether. What do you intend to do?
SHE. I daren't risk it. I'm afraid. If I could only cheat--
HE. A la Buzgago? No, thanks. That's the one point on which I have any notion
of Honor. I won't eat his salt and steal too. I'll loot openly or not at all.
SHE. I never meant anything else.
HE. Then, why in the world do you pretend not to be willing to come?
SHE. It's not pretence, Guy. I am afraid.
HE. Please explain.
SHE. It can't last, Guy. It can't last. You'll get angry, and then you'll
swear, and then you'll get jealous, and then you'll mistrust me--you do now--
and you yourself will be the best reason for doubting. And I--what shall I do?
I shall be no better than Mrs. Buzgago found out--no better than any one. And
you'll know that. Oh, Guy, can't you see?
HE. I see that you are desperately unreasonable, little woman.
SHE. There! The moment I begin to object, you get angry. What will you do when
I am only your property--stolen property? It can't be, Guy. It can't be! I
thought it could, but it can't. You'll get tired of me.
HE. I tell you I shall not. Won't anything make you understand that?
SHE. There, can't you see? If you speak to me like that now, you'll call me
horrible names later, if I don't do everything as you like. And if you were
cruel to me, Guy, where should I go--where should I go? I can't trust you. Oh!
I can't trust you!
HE. I suppose I ought to say that I can trust you. I've ample reason.
SHE. Please don't, dear. It hurts as much as if you hit me.
HE. It isn't exactly pleasant for me.
SHE. I can't help it. I wish I were dead! I can't trust you, and I don't trust
myself. Oh, Guy, let it die away and be forgotten!
HE. Too late now. I don't understand you--I won't--and I can't trust myself to
talk this evening. May I call tomorrow?
SHE. Yes. No! Oh, give me time! The day after. I get into my 'rickshaw here
and meet Him at Peliti's. You ride.
HE. I'll go on to Peliti's too. I think I want a drink. My world's knocked
about my ears and the stars are falling. Who are those brutes howling in the
Old Library?
SHE. They're rehearsing the singing-quadrilles for the Fancy Ball. Can't you
hear Mrs. Buzgago's voice? She has a solo. It's quite a new idea. Listen.
MRS. BUZGAGO (in the Old Library, con. molt. exp.).
See-saw! Margery Daw!
Sold her bed to lie upon straw.
Wasn't she a silly slut
To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?
Captain Congleton, I'm going to alter that to "flirt." It sound better.
HE. No, I've changed my mind about the drink. Good night, little lady. I shall
see you tomorrow?
SHE. Y~es. Good night, Guy. Don't be angry with me.
HE. Angry! You know I trust you absolutely. Good night and-God bless you!
(Three seconds later. Alone.) Hmm! I'd give something to discover whether
there's another man at the back of all this.
A SECOND-RATE WOMAN
Est fuga, volvitur rota,
On we drift; where looms the dim port?
One Two Three Four Five contribute their quota:
Something is gained if one caught but the import,
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.
--Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.
"DRESSED! Don't tell me that woman ever dressed in her life. She stood in the
middle of her room while her ayah--no, her husband--it must have been a man--
threw her clothes at her. She then did her hair with her fingers, and rubbed
her bonnet in the flue under the bed. I know she did, as well as if I had
assisted at the orgy. Who is she?" said Mrs. Hauksbee.
"Don't!" said Mrs. Mallowe, feebly. "You make my head ache. I'm miserable
today. Stay me with fondants, comfort me with chocolates, for I am--Did you
bring anything from Peliti's?"
"Questions to begin with. You shall have the sweets when you have answered
them. Who and what is the creature? There were at least half a dozen men round
her, and she appeared to be going to sleep in their midst."
"Delville," said Mrs. Mallowe, "'Shady' Delville, to distinguish her from Mrs.
Jim of that ilk. She dances as untidily as she dresses, I believe, and her
husband is somewhere in Madras. Go and call, if you are so interested."
"What have I to do with Shigramitish women? She merely caught my attention for
a minute, and I wondered at the attraction that a dowd has for a certain type
of man. I expected to see her walk out of her clothes--until I looked at her
eyes."
"Hooks and eyes, surely," drawled Mrs. Mallowe.
"Don't be clever, Polly. You make my head ache. And round this hayrick stood a
crowd of men--a positive crowd!"
"Perhaps they also expected"--
"Polly, don't be Rabelaisian!"
Mrs. Mallowe curled herself up comfortably on the sofa, and turned her
attention to the sweets. She and Mrs. Hauksbee shared the same house at Simla;
and these things befell two seasons after the matter of Otis Yeere, which has
been already recorded.
Mrs. Hauksbee stepped into the veranda and looked down upon the Mall, her
forehead puckered with thought.
"Hah!" said Mrs. Hauksbee, shortly. "Indeed!"
"What is it?" said Mrs. Mallowe, sleepily.
"That dowd and The Dancing Master--to whom I object."
"Why to The Dancing Master? He is a middle-aged gentleman, of reprobate and
romantic tendencies, and tries to be a friend of mine."
"Then make up your mind to lose him. Dowds cling by nature, and I should
imagine that this animal--how terrible her bonnet looks from above!--is
specially clingsome."
"She is welcome to The Dancing Master so far as I am concerned. I never could
take an interest in a monotonous liar. The frustrated aim of his life is to
persuade people that he is a bachelor."
"0--oh! I think I've met that sort of man before. And isn't he?"
"No. He confided that to me a few days ago. Ugh! Some men ought to he killed."
"What happened then?"
"He posed as the horror of horrors--a misunderstood man. Heaven knows the
femme incomprise is sad enough and had enough--but the other thing!"
"And so fat too! I should have laughed in his face. Men seldom confide in me.
How is it they come to you?"
"For the sake of impressing me with their careers in the past. Protect me from
men with confidences!"
"And yet you encourage them?"
"What can I do? They talk. I listen, and they vow that I am sympathetic. I
know I always profess astonishment even when the plot is--of the most old
possible."
"Yes. Men are so unblushingly explicit if they are once allowed to talk,
whereas women's confidences are full of reservations and fibs, except"--
"When they go mad and babble of the Unutterabilities after a week's
acquaintance. Really, if you come to consider, we know a great deal more of
men than of our own sex."
"And the extraordinary thing is that men will never believe it. They say we
are trying to hide something."
"They are generally doing that on their own account. Alas! These chocolates
pall upon me, and I haven't eaten more than a dozen. I think I shall go to
sleep."
"Then you'll get fat. dear. If you took more exercise and a more intelligent
interest in your neighbors you would--"
"Be as much loved as Mrs. Hauksbee. You're a darling in many ways and I like
you--you are not a woman's woman--but why do you trouble yourself about mere
human beings?"
"Because in the absence of angels, who I am sure would be horribly dull, men
and women are the most fascinating things in the whole wide world, lazy one. I
am interested in The Dowd--I am interested in The Dancing Master--I am
interested in the Hawley Boy--and I am interested in you."
"Why couple me with the Hawley Boy? He is your property."
"Yes, and in his own guileless speech, I'm making a good thing out of him.
When he is slightly more reformed, and has passed his Higher Standard, or
whatever the authorities think fit to exact from him, I shall select a pretty
little girl, the Holt girl, I think, and"--here she waved her hands airily--"
'whom Mrs. Hauksbee bath joined together let no man put asunder.' That's all."
"And when you have yoked May Holt with the most notorious detrimental in
Simla, and earned the undying hatred of Mamma Holt, what will you do with me,
Dispenser of the Destinies of the Universe?"
Mrs. Hauksbee dropped into a low chair in front of the fire, and, chin in
band, gazed long and steadfastly at Mrs. Mallowe.
"I do not know," she said, shaking her head, "what I shall do with you, dear.
It's obviously impossible to marry you to some one else--your husband would
object and the experiment might not be successful after all. I think I shall
begin by preventing you from--what is it?--'sleeping on ale-house benches and
snoring in the sun.'"
"Don't! I don't like your quotations. They are so rude. Go to the Library and
bring me new books."
"While you sleep? No! If you don't come with me, I shall spread your newest
frock on my 'rickshaw-bow, and when any one asks me what I am doing, I shall
say that I am going to Phelps's to get it let out. I shall take care that Mrs.
MacNamara sees me. Put your things on, there's a good girl."
Mrs. Mallowe groaned and obeyed, and the two went off to the Library, where
they found Mrs. Delville and the man who went by the nickname of The Dancing
Master. By that time Mrs Mallowe was awake and eloquent.
"That is the Creature!" said Mrs Hauksbee, with the air of one pointing out a
slug in the road.
"No," said Mrs. Mallowe. "The man is the Creature. Ugh! Good-evening, Mr.
Bent. I thought you were coming to tea this evening."
"Surely it was for tomorrow, was it not?" answered The Dancing Master. "I
understood...I fancied...I'm so sorry...How very unfortunate!..."
But Mrs. Mallowe had passed on.
"For the practiced equivocator you said he was," murmured Mrs. Hauksbee, "he
strikes me as a failure. Now wherefore should he have preferred a walk with
The Dowd to tea with us? Elective affinities, I suppose--both grubby. Polly,
I'd never forgive that woman as long as the world rolls."
"I forgive every woman everything," said Mrs. Mallowe. "He will be a
sufficient punishment for her. What a common voice she has!"
Mrs. Delville's voice was not pretty, her carriage was even less lovely, and
her raiment was strikingly neglected. All these things Mrs. Mallowe noticed
over the top of a magazine.
"Now what is there in her?" said Mrs. Hauksbee. "Do you see what I meant about
the clothes falling off? If I were a man I would perish sooner than be seen
with that rag-bag. And yet, she has good eyes, but--oh!"
"What is it?"
"She doesn't know how to use them! On my Honor, she does not. Look! Oh look!
Untidiness I can endure, but ignorance never! The woman's a fool."
"H'sh! She'll hear you."
"All the women in Simla are fools. She'll think I mean some one else. Now
she's going out. What a thoroughly objectionable couple she and The Dancing
Master make! Which reminds me. Do you suppose they'll ever dance together?"
"Wait and see. I don't envy her the conversation of The Dancing Master--
loathly man. His wife ought to be up here before long."
"Do you know anything about him?"
"Only what he told me. It may be a11 a fiction. He married a girl bred in the
country, I think, and, being an honorable, chivalrous soul, told me that he
repented his bargain and sent her to her mother as often as possible--a person
who has lived in the Doon since the memory of man and goes to Mussoorie when
other people go Home. The wife is with her at present. So he says."
'Babies?'
"One only, but he talks of his wife in a revolting way. I hated him for it. He
thought he was being epigrammatic and brilliant."
"That is a vice peculiar to men. I dislike him because he is generally in the
wake of some girl, disappointing the Eligibles. He will persecute May Holt no
more, unless I am much mistaken."
"No. I think Mrs. Delville may occupy his attention for a while."
"Do you suppose she knows that he is the head of a family?"
"Not from his lips. He swore me to eternal secrecy. Wherefore I tell you.
Don't you know that type of man?"
"Not intimately, thank goodness! As a general rule, when a man begins to abuse
his wife to me, I find that the Lord gives me wherewith to answer him
according to his folly; and we part with a coolness between us. I laugh."
"I'm different. I've no sense of humor."
"Cultivate it, then. It has been my mainstay for more years than I care to
think about. A well-educated sense of Humor will save a woman when Religion,
Training, and Home influences fail; and we may all need salvation sometimes."
"Do you suppose that the Delville woman has humor?"
"Her dress betrays her. How can a Thing who wears her supple'ment under her
left arm have any notion of the fitness of things--much less their folly? If
she discards The Dancing Master after having once seen him dance, I may
respect her, Otherwise--
"But are we not both assuming a great deal too much, dear? You saw the woman
at Peliti's--half an hour later you saw her walking with The Dancing Master--
an hour later you met her here at the Library."
"Still with The Dancing Master, remember."
"Still with The Dancing Master, I admit, but why on the strength of that
should you imagine"--
"I imagine nothing. I have no imagination. I am only convinced that The
Dancing Master is attracted to The Dowd because he is objectionable in every
way and she in every other. If I know the man as you have described him, he
holds his wife in slavery at present."
"She is twenty years younger than he."
"Poor wretch! And, in the end, after he has posed and swaggered and lied--he
has a mouth under that ragged moustache simply made for lies--he will be
rewarded according to his merits."
"I wonder what those really are," said Mrs. Mallowe.
But Mrs. Hauksbee, her face close to the shelf of the new books, was humming
softly: "What shall he have who killed the Deer!" She was a lady of unfettered
speech.
One month later, she announced her intention of calling upon Mrs. Delville.
Both Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Mallowe were in morning wrappers, and there was a
great peace in the land.
"I should go as I was," said Mrs. Mallowe. "It would be a delicate compliment
to her style."
Mrs. Hauksbee studied herself in the glass.
"Assuming for a moment that she ever darkened these doors, I should put on
this robe, after all the others, to show her what a morning wrapper ought to
be. It might enliven her. As it is, I shall go in the dove-colored--sweet
emblem of youth and innocence--and shall put on my new gloves."
"If you really are going, dirty tan would be too good; and you know that dove-
-color spots with the rain."
"I care not. I may make her envious. At least I shall try, though one cannot
expect very much from a woman who puts a lace tucker into her habit."
"Just Heavens! When did she do that?"
"Yesterday--riding with The Dancing Master. I met them at the back of Jakko,
and the rain had made the lace lie down. To complete the effect, she was
wearing an unclean terai with the elastic under her chin. I felt almost too
well content to take the trouble to despise her."
"The Hawley Boy was riding with you. What did he think?"
"Does a boy ever notice these things? Should I like him if he did? He stared
in the rudest way, and just when I thought he had seen the elastic, he said,
'There's something very taking about that face.' I rebuked him on the spot. I
don't approve of boys being taken by faces."
"Other than your own. I shouldn't be in the least surprised if the Hawley Boy
immediately went to call."
"I forbade him. Let her be satisfied with The Dancing Master, and his wife
when she comes up. I'm rather curious to see Mrs. Bent and the Delville woman
together."
Mrs. Hauksbee departed and, at the end of an hour, returned slightly flushed.
"There is no limit to the treachery of youth! I ordered the Hawley Boy, as he
valued my patronage, not to call. The first person I stumble over--literally
stumble over--in her poky, dark, little drawing-room is, of course, the Hawley
Boy. She kept us waiting ten minutes, and then emerged as though he had been
tipped out of the dirty-clothes basket. You know my way, dear, when I am all
put out. I was Superior, crrrushingly Superior! 'Lifted my eyes to Heaven, and
had heard of nothing--'dropped my eyes on the carpet and 'really didn't know'-
-'played with my cardcase and 'supposed so.' The Hawley Boy giggled like a
girl, and I had to freeze him with scowls between the sentences."
"And she?"
"She sat in a heap on the edge of a couch, and managed to convey the
impression that she was suffering from stomach-ache, at the very least. It was
all I could do not to ask after her symptoms. When I rose she grunted just
like a buffalo in the water--too lazy to move."
"Are you certain?"--
"Am I blind, Polly? Laziness, sheer laziness, nothing else--or her garments
were only constructed for sitting down in. I stayed for a quarter of an hour
trying to penetrate the gloom, to guess what her surroundings were like, while
she stuck out her tongue."
"Lu--cy!"
"Well--I'll withdraw the tongue, though I'm sure if she didn't do it when I
was in the room, she did the minute I was outside. At any rate, she lay in a
lump and grunted. Ask the Hawley Boy, dear. I believe the grunts were meant
for sentences. but she spoke so indistinctly that I can't swear to it."
"You are incorrigible, simply."
"I am not! Treat me civilly, give me peace with honor, don't put the only
available seat facing the window, and a child may eat jam in my lap before
Church. But I resent being grunted at. Wouldn't you? Do you suppose that she
communicates her views on life and love to The Dancing Master in a set of
modulated 'Grmphs'?"
"You attach too much importance to The Dancing Master."
"He came as we went, and The Dowd grew almost cordial at the sight of him. He
smiled greasily, and moved about that darkened dog-kennel in a suspiciously
familiar way."
"Don't be uncharitable. Any sin but that I'll forgive."
"Listen to the voice of History. I am only describing what I saw. He entered,
the heap on the sofa revived slightly, and the Hawley Boy and I came away
together. He is disillusioned, hut I felt it my duty to lecture him severely
for going there. And that's all."
"Now for Pity's sake leave the wretched creature and The Dancing Master alone.
They never did you any harm."
"No harm? To dress as an example and a stumbling-block for half Simla, and
then to find this Person who is dressed by the hand of God--not that I wish to
disparage Him for a moment, but you know the tikka-dhurzie way He attires
those lilies of the field--this Person draws the eyes of men--and some of them
nice men? It's almost enough to make one discard clothing. I told the Hawley
Boy so."
"And what did that sweet youth do?"
"Turned shell-pink and looked across the far blue hills like a distressed
cherub. Am I talking wildly, Polly? Let me say my say, and I shall be calm.
Otherwise I may go abroad and disturb Simla with a few original reflections.
Excepting always your own sweet self, there isn't a single woman in the land
who understands me when I am--what's the word?"
"Tete-Fele'e," suggested Mrs. Mallowe.
"Exactly! And now let us have tiffin. The demands of Society are exhausting,
and as Mrs. Delville says"--Here Mrs. Hauksbee, to the horror of the
khitmatgars, lapsed into a series of grunts, while Mrs. Mallowe stared in lazy
surprise.
"'God gie us a gude conceit of oorselves,'" said Mrs. Hauksbee, piously,
returning to her natural speech. "Now, in any other woman that would have been
vulgar. I am consumed with curiosity to see Mrs. Bent. I expect
complications."
"Woman of one idea," said Mrs. Mallowe, shortly; "all complications are as old
as the hills! I have lived through or near all--all--ALL!"
"And yet do not understand that men and women never behave twice alike. I am
old who was young--if ever I put my head in your lap, you dear, big sceptic,
you will learn that my parting is gauze--but never, no never have I lost my
interest in men and women. Polly, I shall see this business Out to the bitter
end."
"I am going to sleep," said Mrs. Mallowe, calmly. "I never interfere with men
or women unless I am compelled," and she retired with dignity to her own room.
Mrs. Hauksbee's curiosity was not long left ungratified, for Mrs. Bent came up
to Simla a few days after the conversation faithfully reported above, and
pervaded the Mall by her husband's side.
"Behold!" said Mrs. Hauksbee, thoughtfully rubbing her nose. "That is the last
link of the chain, if we omit the husband of the Delville, whoever he may be.
Let me consider. The Bents and the Delvilles inhabit the same hotel; and the
Delville is detested by the Waddy--do you know the Waddy?--who is almost as
big a dowd. The Waddy also abominates the male Bent, for which, if her other
sins do not weigh too heavily, she will eventually be caught up to Heaven."
"Don't be irreverent," said Mrs. Mallowe. "I like Mrs. Bent's face."
"I am discussing the Waddy," returned Mrs. Hauksbee, loftily. "The Waddy will
take the female Bent apart, after having borrowed--yes!--everything that she
can, from hairpins to babies' bottles. Such, my dear, is life in a hotel. The
Waddy will tell the female Bent facts and fictions about The Dancing Master
and The Dowd."
"Lucy, I should like you better if you were not always looking into people's
back bedrooms."
"Anybody can look into their front drawing-rooms; and remember whatever I do,
and whatever I look, I never talk--as the Waddy will. Let us hope that The
Dancing Master's greasy smile and manner of the pedagogue will soften the
heart of that cow, his wife. If mouths speak truth, I should think that little
Mrs. Bent could get very angry on occasion.
"But what reason has she for being angry?"
"What reason! The Dancing Master in himself is a reason. How does it go? 'If
in his life some trivial errors fall, Look in his face and you'll believe them
all.' I am prepared to credit any evil of The Dancing Master, because I hate
him so. And The Dowd is so disgustingly badly dressed"--
"That she, too, is capable of every iniquity? I always prefer to believe the
best of everybody. It saves so much trouble."
"Very good. I prefer to believe the worst. It saves useless expenditure of
sympathy. And you may be quite certain that the Waddy believes with me."
Mrs. Mallowe sighed and made no answer.
The conversation was holden after dinner while Mrs. Hauksbee was dressing for
a dance.
"I am too tired to go," pleaded Mrs. Mallowe, and Mrs. Hauksbee left her in
peace till two in the morning, when she was aware of emphatic knocking at her
door.
"Don't be very angry, dear," said Mrs. Hauksbee. "My idiot of an ayah has gone
home, and, as I hope to sleep tonight, there isn't a soul in the place to
unlace me."
"Oh, this is too bad!" said Mrs. Mallowe sulkily.
"'Can't help it. I'm a lone, lorn grass-widow, dear, but I will not sleep in
my stays. And such news, too! Oh, do unlace me, there's a darling! The Dowd--
The Dancing Master--I and the Hawley Boy--You know the North veranda?"
"How can I do anything if you spin round like this?" protested Mrs. Mallowe,
fumbling with the knot of the laces.
"Oh, I forget. I must tell my tale without the aid of your eyes. Do you know
you've lovely eyes, dear? Well to begin with, I took the Hawley Boy to a kala
juggah."
"Did he want much taking?"
"Lots! There was an arrangement of loose-boxes in kanats, and she was in the
next one talking to him."
"Which? How? Explain."
"You know what I mean--The Dowd and The Dancing Master. We could hear every
word and we listened shamelessly--'specially the Hawley Boy. Polly, I quite
love that woman!"
"This is interesting. There! Now turn round. What happened?"
"One moment. Ah-h! Blessed relief. I've been looking forward to taking them
off for the last half-hour--which is ominous at my time of life. But, as I was
saying, we listened and heard The Dowd drawl worse than ever. She drops her
final g's like a barmaid or a blue-blooded Aide-de-Camp. 'Look he-ere, you're
gettin' too fond 0' me,' she said, and The Dancing Master owned it was so in
language that nearly made me ill. The Dowd reflected for a while. Then we
heard her say, 'Look he-ere, Mister Bent, why are you such an awful liar?' I
nearly exploded while The Dancing Master denied the charge. It seems that he
never told her he was a married man."
"I said he wouldn't."
'~And she had taken this to heart, on personal grounds, I suppose. She drawled
along for five minutes, reproaching him with his perfidy and grew quite
motherly. 'Now you've got a nice little wife of your own--you have,' she said.
'She's ten times too good for a fat old man like you, and, look he-ere, you
never told me a word about her, and I've been thinkin' about it a good deal,
and I think you're a liar.' Wasn't that delicious? The Dancing Master
maundered and raved till the Hawley Boy suggested that he should burst in and
beat him. His voice runs up into an impassioned squeak when he is afraid. The
Dowd must be an extraordinary woman. She explained that had he been a bachelor
she might not have objected to his devotion; but since he was a married man
and the father of a very nice baby, she considered him a hypocrite, and this
she repeated twice. She wound up her drawl with: 'An I'm tellin' you this
because your wife is angry with me, an' I hate quarrellin' with any other
woman, an' I like your wife. You know how you have behaved for the last six
weeks. You shouldn't have done it, indeed you shouldn't. You're too old an'
fat.' Can't you imagine how The Dancing Master would wince at that! 'Now go
away,' she said. 'I don't want to tell you what I think of you, because I
think you are not nice. I'll stay he-ere till the next dance begins.' Did you
think that the creature had so much in her?"
"I never studied her as closely as you did. It sounds unnatural. What
happened?"
"The Dancing Master attempted blandishment, reproof, jocularity, and the style
of the Lord High Warden, and I had almost to pinch the Hawley Boy to make him
keep quiet. She grunted at the end of each sentence and, in the end he went
away swearing to himself, quite like a man in a novel. He looked more
objectionable than ever. I laughed. I love that woman--in spite of her
clothes. And now I'm going to bed. What do you think of it?"
"I sha'n't begin to think till the morning," said Mrs. Mallowe, yawning
"Perhaps she spoke the truth. They do fly into it by accident sometimes."
Mrs. Hauksbee's account of her eavesdropping was an ornate one but truthful in
the main. For reasons best known to herself, Mrs. "Shady" Delville had turned
upon Mr Bent and rent him limb from limb, casting him away limp and
disconcerted ere she withdrew the light of her eyes from him permanently.
Being a man of resource, and anything but pleased in that he had been called
both old and fat, he gave Mrs. Bent to understand that he had, during her
absence in the Doon, been the victim of unceasing persecution at the hands of
Mrs. Delville, and he told the tale so often and with such eloquence that he
ended in believing it, while his wife marvelled at the manners and customs of
"some women." When the situation showed signs of languishing, Mrs. Waddy was
always on hand to wake the smouldering fires of suspicion in Mrs. Bent's bosom
and to contribute generally to the peace and comfort of the hotel. Mr. Bent's
life was not a happy one, for if Mrs. Waddy's story were true, he was, argued
his wife, untrustworthy to the last degree. If his own statement was true, his
charms of manner and conversation were so great that he needed constant
surveillance. And he received it, till he repented genuinely of his marriage
and neglected his personal appearance. Mrs. Delville alone in the hotel was
unchanged. She removed her chair some six paces toward the head of the table,
and occasionally in the twilight ventured on timid overtures of friendship to
Mrs. Bent, which were repulsed.
"She does it for my sake," hinted the Virtuous Bent.
"A dangerous and designing woman," purred Mrs. Waddy.
Worst of all, every other hotel in Simla was full!
* * * * * *
"Polly, are you afraid of diphtheria?"
"Of nothing in the world except smallpox. Diphtheria kills, but it doesn't
disfigure. Why do you ask?"
"Because the Bent baby has got it, and the whole hotel is upside down in
consequence. The Waddy has 'set her five young on the rail' and fled. The
Dancing Master fears for his precious throat, and that miserable little woman,
his wife, has no notion of what ought to be done. She wanted to put it into a
mustard bath--for croup!"
"Where did you learn all this?"
"Just now, on the Mall. Dr. Howlen told me. The Manager of the hotel is
abusing the Bents, and the Bents are abusing the manager. They are a feckless
couple."
"Well. What's on your mind?"
"This; and I know it's a grave thing to ask. Would you seriously object to my
bringing the child over here, with its mother?"
"On the most strict understanding that we see nothing of The Dancing Master."
"He will be only too glad to stay away. Polly, you're an angel. The woman
really is at her wits' end."
"And you know nothing about her, careless, and would hold her up to public
scorn if it gave you a minute's amusement. Therefore you risk your life for
the sake of her brat. No, Loo, I'm not the angel. I shall keep to my rooms and
avoid her. But do as you please--only tell me why you do it."
Mrs. Hauksbee's eyes softened; she looked out of the window and back into Mrs.
Mallowe's face.
"I don't know," said Mrs. Hauksbee, simply.
"You dear!"
"Polly!--and for aught you knew you might have taken my fringe off. Never do
that again without warning. Now we'll get the rooms ready. I don't suppose I
shall be allowed to circulate in society for a month."
"And I also. Thank goodness I shall at last get all the sleep I want."
Much to Mrs. Bent's surprise she and the baby were brought over to the house
almost before she knew where she was. Bent was devoutly and undisguisedly
thankful, for he was afraid of the infection, and also hoped that a few weeks
in the hotel alone with Mrs. Delville might lead to explanations. Mrs. Bent
had thrown her jealousy to the winds in her fear for her child's life.
"We can give you good milk," said Mrs. Hauksbee to her, "and our house is much
nearer to the Doctor's than the hotel, and you won't feel as though you were
living in a hostile camp Where is the dear Mrs. Waddy? She seemed to be a
particular friend of yours."
"They've all left me," said Mrs. Bent, bitterly. "Mrs. Waddy went first. She
said I ought to be ashamed of myself for introducing diseases there, and I am
sure it wasn't my fault that little Dora"--
"How nice!" cooed Mrs. Hauksbee. "The Waddy is an infectious disease herself--
'more quickly caught than the plague and the taker runs presently mad.' I
lived next door to her at the Elysium, three years ago. Now see, you won't
give us the least trouble, and I've ornamented all the house with sheets
soaked in carbolic. It smells comforting, doesn't it? Remember I'm always in
call, and my ayah's at your service when yours goes to her meals and--and...
if you cry I'll never forgive you."
Dora Bent occupied her mother's unprofitable attention through the day and the
night. The Doctor called thrice in the twenty-four hours, and the house reeked
with the smell of the Condy's Fluid, chlorine-water, and carbolic acid washes.
Mrs. Mallowe kept to her own rooms--she considered that she had made
sufficient concessions in the cause of humanity--and Mrs. Hauksbee was more
esteemed by the Doctor as a help in the sick-room than the half-distraught
mother.
"I know nothing of illness," said Mrs. Hauksbee to the Doctor. "Only tell me
what to do, and I'll do it."
"Keep that crazy woman from kissing the child, and let her have as little to
do with the nursing as you possibly can," said the Doctor; "I'd turn her out
of the sick-room, but that I honestly believe she'd die of anxiety. She is
less than no good, and I depend on you and the ayahs, remember."
Mrs. Hauksbee accepted the responsibility, though it painted olive hollows
under her eyes and forced her to her oldest dresses. Mrs. Bent clung to her
with more than childlike faith.
"I know you'll, make Dora well, won't you?" she said at least twenty times a
day; and twenty times a day Mrs. Hauksbee answered valiantly, "Of course I
will."
But Dora did not improve, and the Doctor seemed to be always in the house.
"There's some danger of the thing taking a bad turn," he said; "I'll come over
between three and four in the morning tomorrow."
"Good gracious!" said Mrs. Hauksbee. "He never told me what the turn would be!
My education has been horribly neglected; and I have only this foolish mother-
woman to fall back upon."
The night wore through slowly, and Mrs. Hauksbee dozed in a chair by the fire.
There was a dance at the Viceregal Lodge, and she dreamed of it till she was
aware of Mrs. Bent's anxious eyes staring into her own.
"Wake up! Wake up! Do something!" cried Mrs. Bent, piteously. "Dora's choking
to death! Do you mean to let her die?"
Mrs. Hauksbee jumped to her feet and bent over the bed. The child was fighting
for breath, while the mother wrung her hands despairing.
"Oh, what can I do? What can you do? She won't stay still! I can't hold her.
Why didn't the Doctor say this was coming?" screamed Mrs. Bent. "Won't you
help me? She's dying!"
"I-I've never seen a child die before!" stammered Mrs. Hauksbee, feebly, and
then--let none blame her weakness after the strain of long watching--she broke
down, and covered her face with her hands. The ayahs on the threshold snored
peacefully.
There was a rattle of 'rickshaw wheels below, the clash of an opening door, a
heavy step on the stairs, and Mrs. Delville entered to find Mrs. Bent
screaming for the Doctor as she ran round the room. Mrs. Hauksbee, her hands
to her ears, and her face buried in the chintz of a chair, was quivering with
pain at each cry from the bed, and murmuring, "Thank God, I never bore a
child! Oh! thank God, I never bore a child!"
Mrs. Delville looked at the bed for an instant, took Mrs. Bent by the
shoulders, and said, quietly, "Get me some caustic. Be quick."
The mother obeyed mechanically. Mrs. Delville had thrown herself down by the
side of the child and was opening its mouth.
"Oh, you're killing her!" cried Mrs. Bent. "Where's the Doctor! Leave her
alone!"
Mrs. Delville made no reply for a minute, but busied herself with the child.
"Now the caustic, and hold a lamp behind my shoulder. Will you do as you are
told? The acid-bottle, if you don't know what I mean," she said.
A second time Mrs. Delville bent over the child. Mrs. Hauksbee, her face still
hidden, sobbed and shivered. One of the ayahs staggered sleepily into the
room, yawning: "Doctor Sahib come."
Mrs. Delville turned her head.
"You're only just in time," she said. "It was chokin' her when I came in, an'
I've burned it."
"There was no sign of the membrane getting to the air-passages after the last
steaming. It was the general weakness, I feared," said the Doctor half to
himself, and he whispered as he looked. "You've done what I should have been
afraid to do without consultation."
"She was dyin'," said Mrs. Delville, under her breath. "Can you do anythin'?
What a mercy it was I went to the dance!"
Mrs. Hauksbee raised her head.
"Is it all over?" she gasped. "I'm useless--I'm worse than useless! What are
you doing here?"
She stared at Mrs. Delville, and Mrs. Bent, realizing for the first time who
was the Goddess from the Machine. stared also.
Then Mrs. Delville made explanation, putting on a dirty long glove and
smoothing a crumpled and ill-fitting ball-dress.
"I was at the dance, an' the Doctor was tellin' me about your baby bein' so
ill. So I came away early, an' your door was open, an' I-I lost my boy this
way six months ago, an' I've been tryin' to forget it ever since, an' I-I-I-am
very sorry for intrudin' an' anythin' that has happened."
Mrs. Bent was putting out the Doctor's eye with a lamp as he stooped over
Dora.
"Take it away," said the Doctor. "I think the child will do, thanks to you,
Mrs. Delville. I should have come too late, but, I assure you"--he was
addressing himself to Mrs. Delville--"I had not the faintest reason to expect
this. The membrane must have grown like a mushroom. Will one of you help me,
please?"
He had reason for the last sentence. Mrs. Hauksbee had thrown herself into
Mrs. Delville's arms, where she was weeping bitterly, and Mrs. Bent was
unpicturesquely mixed up with both, while from the tangle came the sound of
many sobs and much promiscuous kissing.
"Good gracious! I've spoilt all your beautiful roses!" said Mrs. Hauksbee,
lifting her head from the lump of crushed gum and calico atrocities on Mrs.
Delville's shoulder and hurrying to the Doctor.
Mrs. Delville picked up her shawl, and slouched out of the room, mopping her
eyes with the glove that she had not put on.
"I always said she was more than a woman," sobbed Mrs. Hauksbee, hysterically,
"and that proves it!"
* * * * * *
Six weeks later, Mrs. Bent and Dora had returned to the hotel. Mrs. Hauksbee
had come out of the Valley of Humiliation, had ceased to reproach herself for
her collapse in an hour of need, and was even beginning to direct the affairs
of the world as before.
"So nobody died, and everything went off as it should, and I kissed The Dowd,
Polly. I feel so old. Does it show in my face?"
"Kisses don't as a rule, do they? Of course you know what the result of The
Dowd's providential arrival has been."
"They ought to build her a statue--only no sculptor dare copy those skirts."
"Ah!" said Mrs. Mallowe, quietly. "She has found another reward. The Dancing
Master has been smirking through Simla giving every one to understand that she
came because of her undying love for him--for him--to save his child, and all
Simla naturally believes this."
"But Mrs. Bent"--
"Mrs. Bent believes it more than any one else. She won't speak to The Dowd
now. Isn't The Dancing Master an angel?"
Mrs. Hauksbee lifted up her voice and raged till bedtime. The doors of the two
rooms stood open.
"Polly," said a voice from the darkness, "what did that American-heiress-
globe-trotter-girl say last season when she was tipped out of her 'rickshaw
turning a corner? Some absurd adjective that made the man who picked her up
explode."
"'Paltry,'" said Mrs. Mallowe. "Through her nose--like this--'Ha-ow pahltry!'"
"Exactly," said the voice. "Ha-ow pahltry it all is!"
"Which?"
"Everything. Babies, Diphtheria, Mrs. Bent and The Dancing Master, I whooping
in a chair, and The Dowd dropping in from the clouds. I wonder what the motive
was--all the motives."
"Um!"
"What do you think?"
"Don't ask me. She was a woman. Go to sleep."
* * * * * *
ONLY A SUBALTERN
... Not only to enforce by command but to encourage by example the energetic
discharge of duty and the steady endurance of the difficulties and privations
inseparable from Military Service.
--Bengal Army Regulations.
THEY made Bobby Wick pass an examination at Sandhurst. He was a gentleman
before he was gazetted, so, when the Empress announced that "Gentleman-Cadet
Robert Hanna Wick" was posted as Second Lieutenant to the Tyneside Tail
Twisters at Kram Bokhar, he became an officer and a gentleman, which is an
enviable thing; and there was joy in the house of Wick where Mamma Wick and
all the little Wicks fell upon their knees and offered incense to Bobby by
virtue of his achievements.
Papa Wick had been a Commissioner in his day, holding authority over three
millions of men in the Chota-Buldana Division, building great works for the
good of the land, and doing his best to make two blades of grass grow where
there was but one before. Of course, nobody knew anything about this in the
little English village where he was just 'old Mr. Wick" and had forgotten that
he was a Companion of the Order of the Star of India.
He patted Bobby on the shoulder and said: "Well done, my boy!"
There followed, while the uniform was being prepared, an interval of pure
delight, during which Bobby took brevet-rank as a "man" at the women~swamped
tennis-parties and tea-fights of the village, and, I dare say, had his
joining-time been extended, would have fallen in love with several girls at
once. Little country villages at Home are very full of nice girls, because all
the young men come out to India to make their fortunes.
"India," said Papa Wick, "is the place. I've had thirty years of it and,
begad, I'd like to go back again. When you join the Tail Twisters you'll be
among friends, if every one hasn't forgotten Wick of Chota-Buldana, and a lot
of people will be kind to you for our sakes. The mother will tell you more
about outfit than I can, but remember this. Stick to your Regiment, Bobby--
stick to your Regiment. You'll see men all round you going into the Staff
Corps, and doing every possible sort of duty but regimental, and you may be
tempted to follow suit. Now so long as you keep within your allowance, and I
haven't stinted you there, stick to the Line, the whole Line and nothing but
the Line. Be careful how you back another young fool's bill, and if you fall
in love with a woman twenty years older than yourself, don't tell me about it,
that's all."
With these counsels, and many others equally valuable, did Papa Wick fortify
Bobby ere that last awful night at Portsmouth when the Officers' Quarters held
more inmates than were provided for by the Regulations, and the liberty-men of
the ships fell foul of the drafts for India, and the battle raged from the
Dockyard Gates even to the slums of Longport, while the drabs of Fratton came
down and scratched the faces of the Queen's Officers.
Bobby Wick, with an ugly bruise on his freckled nose, a sick and shaky
detachment to manoeuvre inship and the comfort of fifty scornful females to
attend to, had no time to feel homesick till the Malabar reached mid-Channel,
when he doubled his emotions with a little guard-visiting and a great many
other matters.
The Tail Twisters were a most particular Regiment. Those who knew them least
said that they were eaten up with "side." But their reserve and their internal
arrangements generally were merely protective diplomacy. Some five years
before, the Colonel commanding had looked into the fourteen fearless eyes of
seven plump and juicy subalterns who had all applied to enter the Staff Corps,
and had asked them why the three stars should he, a colonel of the Line,
command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned
tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black
Regiments. He was a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took
measures [with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumor
went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to the Staff
Corps, had many and varied trials to endure. However. a regiment had just as
much right to its own secrets as a woman.
When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his place among the Tail Twisters, it
was gently hut firmly borne in upon him that the Regiment was his father and
his mother and his indissolubly wedded wife, and that there was no crime under
the canopy of heaven blacker than that of bringing shame on the Regiment,
which was the best-shooting, best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest, most
illustrious, and in all respects most desirable Regiment within the compass of
the Seven Seas. He was taught the legends of the Mess Plate from the great
grinning Golden Gods that had come out of the Summer Palace in Pekin to the
silver-mounted markhor-horn snuff-mull presented by the last C. 0. [he who
spake to the seven subalterns]. And every one of those legends told him of
battles fought at long odds, without fear as without support; of hospitality
catholic as an Arab's; of friendships deep as the sea and steady as the
fighting-line; of honor won by hard roads for honor's sake; and of instant and
unquestioning devotion to the Regiment--the Regiment that claims the lives of
all and lives forever.
More than once, too, he came officially into contact with the Regimental
colors, which looked like the lining of a bricklayer's hat on the end of a
chewed stick. Bobby did not kneel and worship them, because British subalterns
are not constructed in that manner. Indeed, he condemned them for their weight
at the very moment that they were filling with awe and other more noble
sentiments.
But best of all was the occasion when he moved with the Tail Twisters, in
review order at the breaking of a November day. Allowing for duty-men and
sick, the Regiment was one thousand and eighty strong, and Bobby belonged to
them; for was he not a Subaltern of the Line the whole Line and nothing but
the Line--as the tramp of two thousand one hundred and sixty sturdy ammunition
boots attested. He would not have changed places with Deighton of the Horse
Battery, whirling by in a pillar of cloud to a chorus of "Strong right! Strong
left!" or Hogan-Yale of the White Hussars, leading his squadron for all it was
worth, with the price of horseshoes thrown in; or "Tick" Boileau, trying to
live up to his fierce blue and gold turban while the wasps of the Bengal
Cavalry stretched to a gallop in the wake of the long, lollopping Walers of
the White Hussars.
They fought through the clear cool day, and Bobby felt a little thrill run
down his spine when he heard the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of the empty cartridge-
cases hopping from the breech-blocks after the roar of the volleys; for he
knew that he should live to hear that sound in action. The review ended in a
glorious chase across the plain--batteries thundering after cavalry to the
huge disgust of the White Hussars, and the Tyneside Tail Twisters hunting a
Sikh Regiment, till the lean lathy Singhs panted with exhaustion. Bobby was
dusty and dripping long before noon, but his enthusiasm was merely focused--
not diminished.
He returned to sit at the feet of Revere, his "skipper," that is to say, the
Captain of his Company, and to be instructed in the dark art and mystery of
managing men, which is a very large part of the Profession of Arms.
"If you haven't a taste that way," said Revere, between his puffs of his
cheroot. "you'll never he able to get the hang of it, but remember Bobby,
'tisn't the best drill, though drill is nearly everything, that hauls a
Regiment through Hell and out on the other side. It's the man who knows how to
handle men--goat-men, swine-men, dog-men, and so on."
"Dormer, for instance," said Bobby. "I think he comes under the head of fool-
men. He mopes like a sick owl."
"That's where you make your mistake, my son. Dormer isn't a fool yet, but he's
a dashed dirty soldier, and his room corporal makes fun of his socks before
kit-inspection. Dormer, being two-thirds pure brute, goes into a corner and
growls."
"How do you know?" said Bobby, admiringly.
"Because a Company commander has to know these things--because, if he does not
know, he may have crime--ay, murder--brewing under his very nose and yet not
see that it's there. Dormer is being badgered out of his mind--big as he is--
and he hasn't intellect enough to resent it. He's taken to quiet boozing and,
Bobby, when the butt of a room goes on the drink, or takes to moping by
himself, measures are necessary to pull him out of himself."
"What measures? 'Man can't run round coddling his men forever."
"No. The men would precious soon show him that he was not wanted. You've got
to"--Here the Color-sergeant entered with some papers; Bobby reflected for a
while as Revere looked through the Company forms.
"Does Dormer do anything, Sergeant?" Bobby asked, with the air of one
continuing an interrupted conversation.
"No, sir. Does 'is dooty like a hortomato," said the Sergeant, wbo delighted
in long words. "A dirty soldier, and 'e's under full stoppages for new kit.
It's covered with scales, sir."
"Scales? What scales?"
"Fish-scales, sir. 'E's always pokin' in the mud by the river an' a-cleanin'
them muchly-fish with 'is thumbs." Revere was still absorbed in the Company
papers, and the Sergeant, who was sternly fond of Bobby, continued,--"'E
generally goes down there when 'e's got 'is skinful, beggin' your pardon, sir,
an' they do say that the more lush in-he-briated 'e is, the more fish 'e
catches. They call 'im the Looney Fish-monger in the Comp'ny, sir."
Revere signed the last paper and the Sergeant retreated.
"It's a filthy amusement," sighed Bobby to himself. Then aloud to Revere: "Are
you really worried about Dormer?"
"A little. You see he's never mad enough to send to a hospital, or drunk
enough to run in, but at any minute he may flare up, brooding and sulking as
he does. He resents any interest being shown in him, and the only time I took
him out shooting he all but shot me by accident."
"I fish," said Bobby, with a wry face. "I hire a country-boat and go down the
river from Thursday to Sunday, and the amiable Dormer goes with me--if you can
spare us both."
"You blazing young fool!" said Revere, but his heart was full of much more
pleasant words.
Bobby, the Captain of a dhoni, with Private Dormer for mate, dropped down the
river on Thursday morning--the Private at the bow, the Subaltern at the helm.
The Private glared uneasily at the Subaltern, who respected the reserve of the
Private.
After six hours, Dormer paced to the stern, saluted, and said--"Beg y'pardon,
sir, but was you ever on the Durh'm Canal?"
"No," said Bobby Wick. "Come and have some tiffin."
They ate in silence. As the evening fell, Private Dormer broke forth, speaking
to himself--"Hi was on the Durh'm Canal, jes' such a night, come next week
twelve month, a-trailin' of my toes in the water." He smoked and said no more
till bedtime.
The witchery of the dawn turned the grey river-reaches to purple, gold, and
opal; and it was as though the lumbering dhoni crept across the splendors of a
new heaven.
Private Dormer popped his head out of his blanket and gazed at the glory below
and around.
"Well--damn-my-eyes!" said Private Dormer, in an awed whisper. "This 'ere is
like a bloomin' gallantry-show!" For the rest of the day he was dumb, but
achieved an ensanguined filthiness through the cleaning of big fish.
The boat returned on Saturday evening. Dormer had been struggling with speech
since noon. As the lines and luggage were being disembarked, he found tongue.
"Beg y'pardon~ sir," he said, "but would you--would you min' shakin' 'ands
with me, sir?"
"Of course not," said Bobby, and he shook accordingly. Dormer returned to
barracks and Bobby to mess.
"He wanted a little quiet and some fishing, I think," said Bobby. "My aunt,
but he's a filthy sort of animal! Have you ever seen him clean 'them, muchly-
fish with 'is thumbs'?"
"Anyhow," said Revere, three weeks later, "he's doing his best to keep his
things clean."
When the spring died, Bobby joined in the general scramble for Hill leave, and
to his surprise and delight secured three months.
"As good a boy as I want," said Revere, the admiring skipper.
"The best of the batch," said the Adjutant to the Colonel. "Keep back that
young skrim-shanker Porkiss, sir, and let Revere make him sit up."
So Bobby departed joyously to Simla Pahar with a tin box of gorgeous raiment.
'Son of Wick--old Wick of Chota-Buldana? Ask him to dinner, dear," said the
aged men.
"What a nice boy!" said the matrons and the maids.
"First-class place, Simla. Oh, ri-ippmg!" said Bobby Wick, and ordered new
white cord breeches on the strength of it.
"We're in a had way," wrote Revere to Bobby at the end of two months. "Since
you left, the Regiment has taken to fever and is fairly rotten with it--two
hundred in hospital, about a hundred in cells--drinking to keep off fever--and
the Companies on parade fifteen file strong at the outside. There's rather
more sickness in the out-villages than I care for, hut then I'm so blistered
with prickly-heat that I'm ready to hang myself. What's the yarn about your
mashing a Miss Haverley up there? Not serious, I hope? You're over-young to
hang millstones round your neck, and the Colonel will turf you out of that in
double-quick time if you attempt it."
It was not the Colonel that brought Bobby out of Simla, but a much more to be
respected Commandant. The sick ness in the out-villages spread, the Bazar was
put out of bounds, and then came the news that the Tail Twisters must go into
camp. The message flashed to the Hill stations.--"Cholera--Leave stopped--
Officers recalled." Alas, for the white gloves in the neatly soldered boxes,
the rides and the dances and picnics that were to he, the loves half spoken,
and the debts unpaid! Without demur and without question, fast as tongue could
fly or pony gallop, hack to their Regiments and their Batteries, as though
they were hastening to their weddings, fled the subalterns.
Bobby received his orders on returning from a dance at Viceregal Lodge where
he had--but only the Haverley girl knows what Bobby had said or how many
waltzes he had claimed for the next ball. Six in the morning saw Bobby at the
Tonga Office in the drenching rain, the whirl of the last waltz still in his
ears, and an intoxication due neither to wine nor waltzing in his brain.
"Good man!" shouted Deighton of the Horse Battery, through the mists. "Whar
you raise dat tonga? I'm coming with you. Ow! But I've had a head and a half.
I didn't sit out all night. They say the Battery's awful bad," and he hummed
dolorously--
Leave the what at the what's-its-name,
Leave the flock without shelter,
Leave the corpse uninterred,
Leave the bride at the altar!
"My faith! It'll be more bally corpse than bride, though, this journey. Jump
in, Bobby. Get on, Coachman!"
On the Umballa platform waited a detachment of officers discussing the latest
news from the stricken cantonment, and it was here that Bobby learned the real
condition of the Tail Twisters.
"They went into camp," said an elderly Major recalled from the whist-tables at
Mussoorie to a sickly Native Regiment, "they went into camp with two hundred
and ten sick in carts. Two hundred and ten fever cases only, and the balance
looking like so many ghosts with sore eyes. A Madras Regiment could have
walked through 'em."
"But they were as fit as be-damned when I left them!" said Bobby.
"Then you'd better make them as fit as be-damned when you rejoin," said the
Major, brutally.
Bobby pressed his forehead against the rain-splashed windowpane as the train
lumbered across the sodden Doab, and prayed for the health of the Tyneside
Tail Twisters. Naini Tal had sent down her contingent with all speed; the
lathering ponies of the Dalhousie Road staggered into Pathankot, taxed to the
full stretch of their strength; while from cloudy Darjiling the Calcutta Mail
whirled up the last straggler of the little army that was to fight a fight, in
which was neither medal nor honor for the winning, against an enemy none other
than "the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday."
And as each man reported himself, he said: "This is a bad business," and went
about his own forthwith, for every Regiment and Battery in the cantonment was
under canvas, the sickness bearing them company.
Bobby fought his way through the rain to the Tail Twisters' temporary mess,
and Revere could have fallen on the boy's neck for the joy of seeing that
ugly, wholesome phiz once more.
"Keep 'em amused and interested," said Revere. "They went on the drink, poor
fools, after the first two cases, and there was no improvement. Oh, it's good
to have you back, Bobby! Porkiss is a--never mind."
Deighton came over from the Artillery camp to attend a dreary mess dinner, and
contributed to the general gloom by nearly weeping over the condition of his
beloved Battery. Porkiss so far forgot himself as to insinuate that the
presence of the officers could do no earthly good, and that the best thing
would be to send the entire Regiment into hospital and "let the doctors look
after them." Porkiss was demoralized with fear, nor was his peace of mind
restored when Revere said coldly: "Oh! The sooner you go out the better, if
that's your way of thinking. Any public school could send us fifty good men in
your place, but it takes time, time, Porkiss, and money, and a certain amount
of trouble, to make a Regiment. 'S'pose you're the person we go into camp for,
eh?"
Whereupon Porkiss was overtaken with a great and chilly fear which a drenching
in the rain did not allay, and, two days later, quitted this world for another
where, men do fondly hope, allowances are made for the weaknesses of the
flesh. The Regimental Sergeant-Major looked wearily across the Sergeants' Mess
tent when the news was announced.
"There goes the worst of them," he said. "It'll take the best, and then,
please God, it'll stop." The Sergeants were silent till one said: "It couldn't
be him!" and all knew of whom Travis was thinking.
Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking
mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted:
haling the sound into the watery sunlight when there was a break in the
weather, and bidding them be of good cheer for their trouble was nearly at an
end; scuttling on his dun pony round the outskirts of the camp and heading
back men who, with the innate perversity of British soldier's, were always
wandering into infected villages, or drinking deeply from rain-flooded
marshes; comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once
tending the dying who had no friends--the men without "townies"; organizing,
with banjos and burned cork, Sing-songs which should allow the talent of the
Regiment full play; and generally, as he explained, "playing the giddy garden-
goat all round."
"You're worth half a dozen of us, Bobby," said Revere in a moment of
enthusiasm. "How the devil do you keep it up?"
Bobby made no answer, but had Revere looked into the breast-pocket of his coat
he might have seen there a sheaf of badly-written letters which perhaps
accounted for the power that possessed the boy. A letter came to Bobby every
other day. The spelling was not above reproach, but the sentiments must have
been most satisfactory, for on receipt Bobby's eyes softened marvelously, and
he was wont to fall into a tender abstraction for a while ere, shaking his
cropped head, he charged into his work.
By what power he drew after him the hearts of the roughest, and the Tail
Twisters counted in their ranks some rough diamonds indeed, was a mystery to
both skipper and C. O., who learned from the regimental chaplain that Bobby
was considerably more in request in the hospital tents than the Reverend John
Emery.
"The men seem fond of you. Are you in the hospitals much?" said the Colonel,
who did his daily round and ordered the men to get well with a hardness that
did not cover his bitter grief.
"A little, sir," said Bobby.
"Shouldn't go there too often if I were you. They say it's not contagious, but
there's no use in running unnecessary risks. We can't afford to have you down,
y'know."
Six days later, it was with the utmost difficulty that the post-runner plashed
his way out to the camp with mailbags, for the rain was falling in torrents.
Bobby received a letter, bore it off to his tent, and, the programme for the
next week's Sing-song being satisfactorily disposed of, sat down to answer it.
For an hour the unhandy pen toiled over the paper, and where sentiment rose to
more than normal tide-level Bobby Wick stuck out his tongue and breathed
heavily. He was not used to letter-writing.
"Beg y'pardon, sir," said a voice at the tent door; "but Dormer's 'orrid bad,
sir, an' they've taken him orf, sir.
"Damn Private Dormer and you too!" said Bobby Wick running the blotter over
the half-finished letter. "Tell him I'll come in the morning."
"'E's awful bad, sir," said the voice, hesitatingly. There was an undecided
squelching of heavy boots.
"Well?" said Bobby, impatiently.
"Excusin' 'imself before an' for takin' the liberty, 'e says it would be a
comfort for to assist 'im, sir, if"--
"Tattoo lao! Get my pony! Here, come in out of the rain till I'm ready. What
blasted nuisances you are! That's brandy. Drink some; you want it. Hang on to
my stirrup and tell me if I go mo fast."
Strengthened by a four-finger "nip" which he swallowed without a wink, the
Hospital Orderly kept up with the slipping, mud-stained, and very disgusted
pony as it shambled to the hospital tent.
Private Dormer was certainly " 'orrid bad." He had all but reached the stage
of collapse and was not pleasant to look upon.
"What's this, Dormer?" said Bobby, bending over the man. "You're not going out
this time. You've got to come fishin' with me once or twice more yet."
The blue lips parted and in the ghost of a whisper said,--"Beg y'pardon, sir,
disturbin' of you now, but would you min' 'oldin' my 'and, sir?"
Bobby sat on the side of the bed, and the icy cold hand closed on his own like
a vice, forcing a lady's ring which was on the little finger deep into the
flesh. Bobby set his lips and waited, the water dripping from the hem of his
trousers. An hour passed and the grasp of the hand did not relax, nor did the
expression on the drawn face change. Bobby with infinite craft lit himself a
cheroot with the left hand--his right arm was numbed to the elbow--and
resigned himself to a night of pain.
Dawn showed a very white-faced Subaltern sitting on the side of a sick man's
cot, and a Doctor in the doorway using language unfit for publication.
"Have you been here all night, you young ass?" said the Doctor.
"There or thereabouts," said Bobby, ruefully. "He's frozen on to me."
Dormer's mouth shut with a click. He turned his head and sighed. The clinging
band opened, and Bobby's arm fell useless at his side.
"He'll do," said the Doctor, quietly. "It must have been a toss-up all through
the night. 'Think you're to be congratulated on this case."
"Oh, bosh!" said Bobby. "I thought the man had gone out long ago--only--only I
didn't care to take my hand away. Rub my arm down, there's a good chap. What a
grip the brute has! I'm chilled to the marrow!" He passed out of the tent
shivering.
Private Dormer was allowed to celebrate his repulse of Death by strong waters.
Four days later, he sat on the side of his cot and said to the patients
mildly: "I'd 'a' liken to 'a' spoken to 'im--so I should."
But at that time Bobby was reading yet another letter--he had the most
persistent correspondent of any man in camp--and was even then about to write
that the sickness had abated, and in another week at the outside would be
gone. He did not intend to say that the chill of a sick man's hand seemed to
have struck into the heart whose capacities for affection he dwelt on at such
length. He did intend to enclose the illustrated programme of the forthcoming
Sing-song whereof he was not a little proud. He also intended to write on many
other matters which do not concern us, and doubtless would have done so but
for the slight feverish headache which made him dull and unresponsive at mess.
"You are overdoing it, Bobby," said his skipper. "'Might give the rest of us
credit of doing a little work. You go on as if you were the whole Mess rolled
into one. Take it easy."
"I will," said Bobby. "I'm feeling done up, somehow." Revere looked at him
anxiously and said nothing.
There was a flickering of lanterns ab3ut the camp that night, and a rumor that
brought men out of their cots to the tent doors, a paddling of the naked feet
of doolie-bearers and the rush of a galloping horse.
"Wot's up?" asked twenty tents; and through twenty tents ran the answer--
"Wick, 'e's down."
They brought the news to Revere and he groaned. "Any one but Bobby and I
shouldn't have cared! The Sergeant-Major was right."
"Not going out this journey," gasped Bobby, as he was lifted from the doolie.
"Not going out this journey." Then with an air of supreme conviction--"I
can't, you see."
"Not if I can do anything!" said the Surgeon-Major, who had hastened over from
the mess where he had been dining.
He and the Regimental Surgeon fought together with Death for the life of Bobby
Wick. Their work was interrupted by a hairy apparition in a blue-grey
dressing-gown who stared in horror at the bed and cried--"Oh, my Gawd. It
can't be 'im!" until an indignant Hospital Orderly whisked him away.
If care of man and desire to live could have done aught, Bobby would have been
saved. As it was, he made a fight of three days, and the Surgeon-Major's brow
uncreased. "We'll save him yet," he said; and the Surgeon, who, though he
ranked with the Captain, had a very youthful heart, went out upon the word and
pranced joyously in the mud.
"Not going out this journey," whispered Bobby Wick, gallantly, at the end of
the third day.
"Bravo!" said the Surgeon-Major. "That's the way to look at it, Bobby."
As evening fell a grey shade gathered round Bobby's mouth, and he turned his
face to the tent wall wearily. The Surgeon-Major frowned.
"I'm awfully tired," said Bobby, very faintly. "What's the use of bothering me
with medicine? I-don't-want-it. Let me alone."
The desire for life had departed, and Bobby was content to drift away on the
easy tide of Death.
"It's no good," said the Surgeon-Major. "He doesn't want to live. He's meeting
it, poor child." And he blew his nose.
Half a mile away, the regimental band was playing the overture to the Sing-
song, for the men had been told that Bobby was out of danger. The clash of the
brass and the wail of the horns reached Bobby's ears.
Is there a single joy or pain,
That I should never kno-ow?
You do not love me, 'tis in vain,
Bid me goodbye and go!
An expression of hopeless irritation crossed the boy's face, and he tried to
shake his head.
The Surgeon-Major bent down--"What is it? Bobby?"--
"Not that waltz," muttered Bobby. "That's our own--our very ownest own. Mummy
dear."
With this he sank into the stupor that gave place to death early next morning.
Revere, his eyes red at the rims and his nose very white, went into Bobby's
tent to write a letter to Papa Wick which should bow the white head of the ex-
Commissioner of Chota-Buldana in the keenest sorrow of his life. Bobby's
little store of papers lay in confusion on the table, and among them a half-
finished letter. The last sentence ran: "So you see, darling, there is really
no fear, because as long as I know you care for me and I care for you, nothing
can touch me."
Revere stayed in the tent for an hour. When he came out, his eyes were redder
than ever.
* * * * * *
Private Conklin sat on a turned-down bucket, and listened to a not unfamiliar
tune. Private Conklin was a convalescent and should have been tenderly
treated.
"Ho!" said Private Conklin. "There's another bloomin' orf'cer dead."
The bucket shot from under him, and his eyes filled with a smithyful of
sparks. A tall man in a blue-grey bedgown was regarding him with deep
disfavor.
"You ought to take shame for yourself, Conky! Orf'cer?--bloomin' orf'cer? I'll
learn you to misname the likes of 'im. Hangel! Bloomin' Hangel! That's wot 'e
is!"
And the Hospital Orderly was so satisfied with the justice of the punishment
that he did not even order Private Dormer back to his cot.
* * * * *
IN THE MATTER OF A PRIVATE
Hurrah! hurrah! a soldier's life for me!
Shout, boys, shout! for it makes you jolly and free.
--The Ramrod Corps.
People who have seen, say that one of the quaintest spectacles of human
frailty is an outbreak of hysterics in a girls' school. It starts without
warning, generally on a hot afternoon among the elder pupils. A girl giggles
till the giggle gets beyond control. Then she throws up her head, and cries,
"Honk, honk, honk," like a wild goose, and tears mix with the laughter. If the
mistress be wise she will rap out something severe at this point to check
matters. If she be tender-hearted, and send for a drink of water, the chances
are largely in favor of another girl laughing at the afflicted one and herself
collapsing. Thus the trouble spreads, and may end in half of what answers to
the Lower Sixth of a boys' school rocking and whooping together. Given a week
of warm weather, two stately promenades per diem, a heavy mutton and rice meal
in the middle of the day, a certain amount of nagging from the teachers, and a
few other things, some amazing effects develop. At least this is what folk say
who have had experience.
Now, the Mother Superior of a Convent and the Colonel of a British Infantry
Regiment would be justly shocked at any comparison being made between their
respective charges. But it is a fact that, under certain circumstances, Thomas
in bulk can be worked up into dithering, rippling hysteria. He does not weep,
but he shows his trouble unmistakably, and the consequences get into the
newspapers, and all the good people who hardly know a Martini from a Snider
say: "Take away the brute's ammunition!"
Thomas isn't a brute, and his business, which is to look after the virtuous
people, demands that he shall have his ammunition to his hand. He doesn't wear
silk stockings, and he really ought to be supplied with a new Adjective to
help him to express his opinions; but, for all that, he is a great man. If you
call him "the heroic defender of the national honor" one day, and "a brutal
and licentious soldiery" the next, you naturally bewilder him, and he looks
upon you with suspicion. There is nobody to speak for Thomas except people who
have theories to work off on him; and nobody understands Thomas except Thomas,
and he does not always know what is the matter with himself.
That is the prologue. This is the story:
Corporal Slane was engaged to be married to Miss Jhansi M'Kenna, whose history
is well known in the regiment and elsewhere. He had his Colonel's permission,
and, being popular with the men, every arrangement had been made to give the
wedding what Private Ortheris called "eeklar." It fell in the heart of the hot
weather, and, after the wedding, Slane was going up to the Hills with the
Bride. None the less, Slane's grievance was that the affair would he only a
hired-carriage wedding, and he felt that the "eeklar" of that was meagre. Miss
M'Kenna did not care so much. The Sergeant's wife was helping her to make her
wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only
moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or less
miserable.
And they had so much to make them happy, too. All their work was over at eight
in the morning, and for the rest of the day they could lie on their backs and
smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies. They enjoyed a fine, full
flesh meal in the middle of the day, and then threw themselves down on their
cots and sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their
"towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words, and the
Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question they had heard many
times before.
There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance Room with the
second-hand papers in it; but a man of any profession cannot read for eight
hours a day in a temperature of 96 degrees or 98 degrees in the shade, running
up sometimes to 103 degrees at midnight. Very few men, even though they get a
pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer and hide it under their cots, can continue
drinking for six hours a day. One man tried, but he died, and nearly the whole
regiment went to his funeral because it gave them something to do. It was too
early for the excitement of fever or cholera. The men could only wait and wait
and wait, and watch the shadow of the barrack creeping across the blinding
white dust. That was a gay life.
They lounged about cantonments--it was too hot for any sort of game, and
almost too hot for vice--and fuddled themselves in the evening, and filled
themselves to distension with the healthy nitrogenous food provided for them,
and the more they stoked the less exercise they took and more explosive they
grew. Then tempers began to wear away, and men fell a-brooding over insults
real or imaginary, for they had nothing else to think of. The tone of the
repartees changed, and instead of saying light-heartedly: "I'll knock your
silly face in," men grew laboriously polite and hinted that the cantonments
were not big enough for themselves and their enemy, and that there would he
more space for one of the two in another place.
It may have been the Devil who arranged the thing, but the fact of the case is
that Losson had for a long time been worrying Simmons in an aimless way. It
gave him occupation. The two had their cots side by side, and would sometimes
spend a long afternoon swearing at each other; but Simmons was afraid of
Losson and dared not challenge him to a fight. He thought over the words in
the hot still nights, and half the hate he felt toward Losson be vented on the
wretched punkah-coolie.
Losson bought a parrot in the bazar, and put it into a little cage, and
lowered the cage into the cool darkness of a well, and sat on the well-curb,
shouting bad language down to the parrot. He taught it to say: "Simmons, ye
so-oor," which means swine, and several other things entirely unfit for
publication. He was a big gross man, and he shook like a jelly when the parrot
had the sentence correctly. Simmons, however, shook with rage, for all the
room were laughing at him--the parrot was such a disreputable puff of green
feathers and it looked so human when it chattered. Losson used to sit,
swinging his fat legs, on the side of the cot, and ask the parrot what it
thought of Simmons. The parrot would answer: "Simmons, ye so-oor." "Good boy,"
Losson used to say, scratching the parrot's head; "ye 'ear that, Sim?"
And Simmons used to turn over on his stomach and make answer: "I 'ear. Take
'eed you don't 'ear something one of these days."
In the restless nights, after he had been asleep all day, fits of blind rage
came upon Simmons and held him till he trembled all over, while he thought in
how many different ways he would slay Losson. Sometimes he would picture
himself trampling the life out of the man, with heavy ammunition-boots, and at
others smashing in his face with the butt, and at others jumping on his
shoulders and dragging the head back till the neckbone cracked. Then his mouth
would feel hot and fevered, and he would reach out for another sup of the beer
in the pannikin.
But the fancy that came to him most frequently and stayed with him longest was
one connected with the great roll of fat under Losson's right ear. He noticed
it first on a moonlight night, and thereafter it was always before his eyes.
It was a fascinating roll of fat. A man could get his hand upon it and tear
away one side of the neck; or he could place the muzzle of a rifle on it and
blow away all the head in a flash. Losson had no right to be sleek and
contented and well-to-do, when he, Simmons, was the butt of the room, Some
day, perhaps, he would show those who laughed at the "Simmons, ye so-oor"
joke, that he was as good as the rest, and held a man's life in the crook of
his forefinger. When Losson snored, Simmons hated him more bitterly than ever.
Why should Losson be able to sleep when Simmons had to stay awake hour after
hour, tossing and turning on the tapes, with the dull liver pain gnawing into
his right side and his head throbbing and aching after Canteen? He thought
over this for many nights, and the world became unprofitable to him. He even
blunted his naturally fine appetite with beer and tobacco; and all the while
the parrot talked at and made a mock of him.
The heat continued and the tempers wore away more quickly than before. A
Sergeant's wife died of heat-apoplexy in the night, and the rumor ran abroad
that it was cholera. Men rejoiced openly, hoping that it would spread and send
them into camp. But that was a false alarm.
It was late on a Tuesday evening, and the men were waiting in the deep double
verandas for "Last Posts," when Simmons went to the box at the foot of his
bed, took out his pipe, and slammed the lid down with a bang that echoed
through the deserted barrack like the crack of a rifle. Ordinarily speaking,
the men would have taken no notice; but their nerves were fretted to fiddle-
strings. They jumped up, and three or four clattered into the barrack-room
only to find Simmons kneeling by his box.
"Owl It's you, is it?" they said and laughed foolishly. "We t h o u g h t
'twas"--Simmons rose slowly. If the accident had so shaken his fellows, what
would not the reality do?
"You thought it was--did you? And what makes you think?" he said, lashing
himself into madness as he went on; "to Hell with your thinking, ye dirty
spies."
"Simmons, ye so-oor," chuckled the parrot in the veranda, sleepily,
recognizing a well-known voice. Now that was absolutely all.
The tension snapped. Simmons fell back on the arm-rack deliberately,--the men
were at the far end of the room,--and took out his rifle and packet of
ammunition. "Don't go playing the goat, Sim!" said Losson. "Put it down," but
there was a quaver in his voice. Another man stooped, slipped his boot and
hurled it at Simmons's head. The prompt answer was a shot which, fired at
random, found its billet in Losson's throat. Losson fell forward without a
word, and the others scattered.
"You thought it was!" yelled Simmons. "You're drivin' me to it! I tell you
you're drivin' me to it! Get up, Losson, an' don't lie shammin' there--you an'
your blasted parrit that druv me to it!"
But there was an unaffected reality about Losson's pose that showed Simmons
what he had done. The men were still clamoring n the veranda. Simmons
appropriated two more packets of ammunition and ran into the moonlight,
muttering: "I'll make a night of it. Thirty roun's, an' the last for myself.
Take you that, you dogs!"
He dropped on one knee and fired into the brown of the men on the veranda, but
the bullet flew high, and landed in the brickwork with a vicious phat that
made some of the younger ones turn pale. It is, as musketry theorists observe,
one thing to fire and another to be fired at.
Then the instinct of the chase flared up. The news spread from barrack to
barrack, and the men doubled out intent on the capture of Simmons, the wild
beast, who was heading for the Cavalry parade-ground, stopping now and again
to send back a shot and a curse in the direction of his pursuers.
"I'll learn you to spy on me!" he shouted; "I'll learn you to give me dorg's
names! Come on the 'ole lot o' you! Colonel John Anthony Deever, C.B.!"--he
turned toward the Infantry Mess and shook his rifle--"you think yourself the
devil of a man--but I tell you that if you put your ugly old carcass outside
o' that door, I'll make you the poorest-lookin' man in the army. Come out,
Colonel John Anthony Deever, C.B.! Come out and see me practiss on the rainge.
I'm the crack shot of the 'ole bloomin' battalion." In proof of which
statement Simmons fired at the lighted windows of the mess-house.
"Private Simmons, E Comp'ny, on the Cavalry p'rade-ground, Sir, with thirty
rounds," said a Sergeant breathlessly to the Colonel. "Shootin' right and
lef', Sir. Shot Private Losson. What's to be done, Sir?"
Colonel John Anthony Deever, C.B., sallied out, only to be saluted by s spurt
of dust at his feet.
"Pull up!" said the Second in Command; "I don't want my step in that way,
Colonel. He's as dangerous as a mad dog."
"Shoot him like one, then," said the Colonel, bitterly, "if he won't take his
chance, My regiment, too! If it had been the Towheads I could have under
stood."
Private Simmons had occupied a strong position near a well on the edge of the
parade-ground, and was defying the regiment to come on. The regiment was not
anxious to comply, for there is small honor in being shot by a fellow-private.
Only Corporal Slane, rifle in band, threw himself down on the ground, and
wormed his way toward the well.
"Don't shoot," said he to the men round him; "like as not you'll hit me. I'll
catch the beggar, livin'."
Simmons ceased shouting for a while, and the noise of trap-wheels could be
heard across the plain. Major Oldyn, commanding the Horse Battery, was coming
back from a dinner in the Civil Lines; was driving after his usual custom--
that is to say, as fast as the horse could go.
"A orf'cer! A blooming spangled orf'cer," shrieked Simmons; "I'll make a
scarecrow of that orf'cer!" The trap stopped.
"What's this?" demanded the Major of Gunners. "You there, drop your rifle."
"Why, it's Jerry Blazes! I ain't got no quarrel with you, Jerry Blazes. Pass
frien', an' all's well!"
But Jerry Blazes had not the faintest intention of passing a dangerous
murderer. He was, as his adoring Battery swore long and fervently, without
knowledge of fear, and they were surely the best judges, for Jerry Blazes, it
was notorious, had done his possible to kill a man each time the Battery went
out.
He walked toward Simmons, with the intention of rushing him, and knocking him
down.
"Don't make me do it, Sir," said Simmons; "I ain't got nothing agin you. Ah!
you would?"--the Major broke into a run--"Take that then!"
The Major dropped with a bullet through his shoulder, and Simmons stood over
him. He had lost the satisfaction of killing Losson in the desired way: hut
here was a helpless body to his hand. Should be slip in another cartridge, and
blow off the head, or with the butt smash in the white face? He stopped to
consider, and a cry went up from the far side of the parade-ground: "He's
killed Jerry Blazes!" But in the shelter of the well-pillars Simmons was safe
except when he stepped out to fire. "I'll blow yer 'andsome 'ead off, Jerry
Blazes," said Simmons, reflectively. "Six an' three is nine an one is ten, an'
that leaves me another nineteen, an' one for myself." He tugged at the string
of the second packet of ammunition. Corporal Slane crawled out of the shadow
of a bank into the moonlight.
"I see you!" said Simmons. "Come a bit furder on an' I'll do for you."
"I'm comm'," said Corporal Slane, briefly; "you've done a bad day's work, Sim.
Come out 'ere an' come back with me."
"Come to,"--laughed Simmons, sending a cartridge home with his thumb. "Not
before I've settled you an' Jerry Blazes."
The Corporal was lying at full length in the dust of the parade-ground, a
rifle under him. Some of the less-cautious men in the distance shouted: "Shoot
'im! Shoot 'im, Slane !"
"You move 'and or foot, Slane," said Simmons, "an' I'll kick Jerry Blazes'
'ead in, and shoot you after."
"I ain't movin'," said the Corporal, raising his head; "you daren't 'it a man
on 'is legs. Let go o' Jerry Blazes an' come out o' that with your fistes.
Come an' 'it me. You daren't, you bloomin' dog-shooter!"
"I dare."
"You lie, you man-sticker. You sneakin', Sheeny butcher, you lie. See there!"
Slane kicked the rifle away, and stood up in the peril of his life. "Come on,
now!"
The temptation was more than Simmons could resist, for the Corporal in his
white clothes offered a perfect mark.
"Don't misname me," shouted Simmons, firing as he spoke. The shot missed, and
the shooter, blind with rage, threw his rifle down and rushed at Slane from
the protection of the well. Within striking distance, he kicked savagely at
Slane's stomach, but the weedy Corporal knew something of Simmons's weakness,
and knew, too, the deadly guard for that kick. Bowing forward and drawing up
his right leg till the heel of the right foot was set some three inches above
the inside of the left knee-cap, he met the blow standing on one leg--exactly
as Gonds stand when they meditate--and ready for the fall that would follow.
There was an oath, the Corporal fell over his own left as shinbone met
shinbone, and the Private collapsed, his right leg broken an inch above the
ankle.
"'Pity you don't know that guard, Sim," said Slane, spitting out the dust as
he rose. Then raising his voice, "Come an' take him orf. I've bruk 'is leg."
This was not strictly true, for the Private had accomplished his own downfall,
since it is the special merit of that leg-guard that the harder the kick the
greater the kicker's discomfiture.
Slane walked to Jerry Blazes and hung over him with ostentatious anxiety,
while Simmons, weeping with pain, was carried away. " 'Ope you ain't 'urt
badly, Sir," said Slane. The Major had fainted, and there was an ugly, ragged
hole through the top of his arm. Slane knelt down and murmured. "S'elp me, I
believe 'e's dead. Well, if that ain't my blooming luck all over!"
But the Major was destined to lead his Battery afield for many a long day with
unshaken nerve. He was removed, and nursed and petted into convalescence,
while the Battery discussed the wisdom of capturing Simmons, and blowing him
from a gun. They idolized their Major, and his reappearance on parade brought
about a scene nowhere provided for in the Army Regulations.
Great, too, was the glory that fell to Slane's share. The Gunners would have
made him drunk thrice a day for at least a fortnight. Even the Colonel of his
own regiment complimented him upon his coolness, and the local paper called
him a hero. These things did not puff him up. When the Major offered him money
and thanks, the virtuous Corporal took the one and put aside the other. But he
had a request to make and prefaced it with many a "Beg y'pardon, Sir." Could
the Major see his way to letting the Slane-M'Kenna wedding be adorned by the
presence of four Battery horses to pull a hired barouche? The Major could, and
so could the Battery. Excessively so. It was a gorgeous wedding.
* * * * * *
"Wot did I do it for?" said Corporal Slane. "For the 'orses 0' course. Jhansi
ain't a beauty to look at, but I wasn't goin' to 'ave a hired turn-out. Jerry
Blazes? If I 'adn't 'a' wanted something, Sim might ha' blowed Jerry Blazes'
blooming 'ead into Hirish stew for aught I'd 'a' cared."
And they hanged Private Simmons--hanged him as high as Haman in hollow square
of the regiment; and the Colonel said it was Drink; and the Chaplain was sure
it was the Devil; and Simmons fancied it was both, but he didn't know, and
only hoped his fate would be a warning to his companions; and half a dozen
"intelligent publicists" wrote six beautiful leading articles on "'The
Prevalence of Crime in the Army."
But not a soul thought of comparing the "bloody-minded Simmons" to the
squawking, gaping schoolgirl with which this story opens.
THE ENLIGHTENMENTS OF PAGETT, M.P.
"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their
importunate chink while thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow
of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that
those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field--that, of
course, they are many in number or that, after all, they are other than the
little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of
the hour."
--Burke: "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
They were sitting in the veranda of "the splendid palace of an Indian Pro-
Consul"; surrounded by all the glory and mystery of the immemorial East. In
plain English it was a one-storied, ten-roomed, whitewashed, mud-roofed
bungalow, set in a dry garden of dusty tamarisk trees and divided from the
road by a low mud wall. The green parrots screamed overhead as they flew in
battalions to the river for their morning drink. Beyond the wall, clouds of
fine dust showed where the cattle and goats of the city were passing afield to
graze. The remorseless white light of the winter sunshine of Northern India
lay upon everything and improved nothing, from the whining Persian-wheel by
the lawn-tennis court to the long perspective of level road and the blue,
domed tombs of Mohammedan saints just visible above the trees.
"A Happy New Year," said Orde to his guest. "It's the first you've ever spent
out of England, isn't it?"
"Yes. 'Happy New Year," said Pagett, smiling at the sunshine. "What a divine
climate you have here! Just think of the brown cold fog hanging over London
now!" And he rubbed his hands.
It was more than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and
their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to
become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other
more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the
English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's position
with a loyal constituency, and he had grown insensibly to regard himself in
some sort as a pillar of the Empire, whose real worth would be known later on.
After a few years of conscientious attendance at many divisions, after
newspaper battles innumerable and the publication of interminable
correspondence, and more hasty oratory than in his calmer moments he cared to
think upon, it occurred to him, as it had occurred to many of his fellows in
Parliament, that a tour to India would enable him to sweep a larger lyre and
address himself to the problems of Imperial administration with a firmer hand.
Accepting, therefore, a general invitation extended to him by Orde some years
before, Pagett bad taken ship to Karachi, and only overnight had been received
with joy by the Deputy-Commissioner of Amara. They had sat late, discussing
the changes and chances of twenty years, recalling the names of the dead, and
weighing the futures of the living, as is the custom of men meeting after
intervals of action.
Next morning they smoked the after-breakfast pipe in the veranda, still
regarding each other curiously, Pagett, in a light grey frock-coat and
garments much too thin for the time of the year, and a puggried sun-hat
carefully and wonderfully made, Orde in a shooting coat, riding breeches,
brown cowhide boots with spurs, and a battered flax helmet. He had ridden some
miles in the early morning to inspect a doubtful river dam. The men's faces
differed as much as their attire. Orde's worn and wrinkled around the eyes,
and grizzled at the temples, was the harder and more square of the two, and it
was with something like envy that the owner looked at the comfortable outlines
of Pagett's blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye,
and the mobile, clean-shaved lips.
"And this is India!" said Pagett for the twentieth time staring long and
intently at the grey feathering of the tamarisks.
"One portion of India only. It's very much like this for 300 miles in every
direction. By the way, now that you have rested a little--I wouldn't ask the
old question before--what d'you think of the country?"
"'Tis the most pervasive country that ever yet was seen. I acquired several
pounds of your country coming up from Karachi. The air is heavy with it, and
for miles and miles along that distressful eternity of rail there's no horizon
to show where air and earth separate."
"Yes. It isn't easy to see truly or far in India. But you had a decent passage
out, hadn't you?"
"Very good on the whole. Your Anglo-Indian may be unsympathetic about one's
political views; but he has reduced ship life to a science."
"The Anglo-Indian is a political orphan, and if he's wise he won't be in a
hurry to be adopted by your party grandmothers. But how were your companions,
unsympathetic?"
"Well, there was a man called Dawlishe, a judge somewhere in this country it
seems, and a capital partner at whist by the way, and when I wanted to talk to
him about the progress of India in a political sense (Orde hid a grin, which
might or might not have been sympathetic), the National Congress movement, and
other things in which, as a Member of Parliament, I'm of course interested, he
shifted the subject, and when I once cornered him, he looked me calmly in the
eye, and said: 'That's all Tommy rot. Come and have a game at Bull.' You may
laugh; but that isn't the way to treat a great and important question; and,
knowing who I was, well, I thought it rather rude, don't you know; and yet
Dawlishe is a thoroughly good fellow."
"Yes; he's a friend of mine, and one of the straightest men I know. I suppose,
like many Anglo-Indians, he felt it was hopeless to give you any just idea of
any Indian question without the documents before you, and in this case the
documents you want are the country and the people."
"Precisely. That was why I came straight to you, bringing an open mind to bear
on things. I'm anxious to know what popular feeling in India is really like
y'know, now that it has wakened into political life. The National Congress, in
spite of Dawlishe, must have caused great excitement among the masses?"
"On the contrary, nothing could be more tranquil than the state of popular
feeling; and as to excitement, the people would as soon be excited over the
'Rule of Three' as over the Congress."
"Excuse me, Orde, but do you think you are a fair judge? Isn't the official
Anglo-Indian naturally jealous of any external influences that might move the
masses, and so much opposed to liberal ideas, truly liberal ideas, that he can
scarcely be expected to regard a popular movement with fairness?"
"What did Dawlishe say about Tommy Rot? Think a moment, old man. You and I
were brought up together; taught by the same tutors, read the same books,
lived the same life, and new languages, and work among new races; while you,
more fortunate, remain at home. Why should I change my mind--our mind--because
I change my sky? Why should I and the few hundred Englishmen in my service
become unreasonable, prejudiced fossils, while you and your newer friends
alone remain bright and open-minded? You surely don't fancy civilians are
members of a Primrose League?"
"Of course not, but the mere position of an English official gives him a point
of view which cannot but bias his mind on this question." Pagett moved his
knee up and down a little uneasily as he spoke.
"That sounds plausible enough, but, like more plausible notions on Indian
matters, I believe it's a mistake. You'll find when you come to consult the
unofficial Briton that our fault, as a class--I speak of the civilian now--is
rather to magnify the progress that has been made toward liberal institutions.
It is of English origin, such as it is, and the stress of our work since the
Mutiny--only thirty years ago--has been in that direction. No, I think you
will get no fairer or more dispassionate view of the Congress business than
such men as I can give you. But I may as well say at once that those who know
most of India, from the inside, are inclined to wonder at the noise our
scarcely begun experiment makes in England."
"But surely the gathering together of Congress delegates is of itself a new
thing."
"There's nothing new under the sun When Europe was a jungle half Asia flocked
to the canonical conferences of Buddhism; and for centuries the people have
gathered at Pun, Hurdwar, Trimbak, and Benares in immense numbers. A great
meeting, what you call a mass meeting, is really one of the oldest and most
popular of Indian institutions in this topsy-turvy land, and though they have
been employed in clerical work for generations they have no practical
knowledge of affairs. A ship's clerk is a useful person, but he is scarcely
the captain; and an orderly room writer, however smart he may be, is not the
colonel. You see, the writer class in India has never till now aspired to
anything like command. It wasn't allowed to. The Indian gentleman, for
thousands of years past, has resembled Victor Hugo's noble:
"'Un vrai sire Chatelain Laisse ecrire Le vilain. Sa main digne Quand il signe
Egratigne Le velin.'
"And the little egratignures he most likes to make have been scored pretty
deeply by the sword."
"But this is childish and mediaeval nonsense!"
"Precisely; and from your, or rather our, point of view the pen is mightier
than the sword. In this country it's otherwise. The fault lies in our Indian
balances, not yet adjusted to civilized weights and measures."
"Well, at all events, this literary class represent the natural aspirations
and wishes of the people at large, though it may not exactly lead them, and,
in spite of all you say, Orde, I defy you to find a really sound English
Radical who would not sympathize with those aspirations."
Pagett spoke with some warmth, and he had scarcely ceased when a well-
appointed dog-cart turned into the compound gates, and Orde rose saying: "Here
is Edwards, the Master of the Lodge I neglect so diligently, come to talk
about accounts, I suppose."
As the vehicle drove up under the porch Pagett also rose, saying with the
trained effusion born of much practice: "But this is also my friend, my old
and valued friend Edwards. I'm delighted to see you. I knew you were in India,
but not exactly where."
"Then it isn't accounts, Mr. Edwards," said Orde, cheerily.
"Why, no, sir; I heard Mr. Pagett was coming, and as our works were closed for
the New Year I thought I would drive over and see him."
"A very happy thought. Mr. Edwards, you may not know, Orde, was a leading
member of our Radical Club at Switchton when I was beginning political life,
and I owe much to his exertions. There's no pleasure like meeting an old
friend, except, perhaps, making a new one. I suppose, Mr. Edwards, you stick
to the good old cause?"
"Well, you see, sir, things are different out here. There's precious little
one can find to say against the Government, which was the main of our talk at
home, and them that do say things are not the sort o' people a man who
respects himself would like to be mixed up with. There are no politics, in a
manner of speaking, in India. It's all work."
"Surely you are mistaken, my good friend. Why I have come all the way from
England just to see the working of this great National movement."
"I don't know where you're going to find the nation as moves to begin with,
and then you'll be hard put to it to find what they are moving about. It's
like this, sir," said Edwards, who had not quite relished being called "my
good friend." "They haven't got any grievance--nothing to hit with, don't you
see, sir; and then there's not much to hit against, because the Government is
more like a kind of general Providence, directing an old-established state of
things, than that at home, where there's something new thrown down for us to
fight about every three months."
"You are probably, in your workshops, full of English mechanics, out of the
way of learning what the masses think."
"I don't know so much about that. There are four of us English foremen, and
between seven and eight hundred native fitters, smiths, carpenters, painters,
and such like."
"And they are full of the Congress, of course?"
"Never hear a word of it from year's end to year's end, and I speak the talk
too. But I wanted to ask how things are going on at home--old Tyler and Brown
and the rest?"
"We will speak of them presently, but your account of the indifference of your
men surprises me almost as much as your own. I fear you are a backslider from
the good old doctrine, Edwards." Pagett spoke as one who mourned the death of
a near relative.
"Not a bit, Sir, but I should be if I took up with a parcel of baboos,
pleaders, and schoolboys, as never did a day's work in their lives, and
couldn't if they tried. And if you was to poll us English railway men,
mechanics, tradespeople, and the like of that all up and down the country from
Peshawur to Calcutta, you would find us mostly in a tale together. And yet
you'd know we're the same English you pay some respect to at home at 'lection
time, and we have the pull o' knowing something about it."
"This is very curious, but you will let me come and see you, and perhaps you
will kindly show me the railway works, and we will talk things over at
leisure. And about all old friends and old times," added Pagett, detecting
with quick insight a look of disappointment in the mechanic's face.
Nodding briefly to Orde, Edwards mounted his dog-cart and drove off.
"It's very disappointing," said the Member to Orde, who, while his friend
discoursed with Edwards, had been looking over a bundle of sketches drawn on
grey paper in purple ink, brought to him by a Chuprassee.
"Don't let it trouble you, old chap," 'said Orde, sympathetically. "Look here
a moment, here are some sketches by the man who made the carved wood screen
you admired so much in the dining-room, and wanted a copy of, and the artist
himself is here too."
"A native?" said Pagett.
"Of course," was the reply, "Bishen Singh is his name, and he has two brothers
to help him. When there is an important job to do, the three go into
partnership, but they spend most of their time and all their money in
litigation over an inheritance, and I'm afraid they are getting involved,
Thoroughbred Sikhs of the old rock, obstinate, touchy, bigoted, and cunning,
but good men for all that. Here is Bishen Singh--shall we ask him about the
Congress?"
But Bishen Singh, who approached with a respectful salaam, had never heard of
it, and he listened with a puzzled face and obviously feigned interest to
Orde's account of its aims and objects, finally shaking his vast white turban
with great significance when he learned that it was promoted by certain
pleaders named by Orde, and by educated natives. He began with labored respect
to explain how he was a poor man with no concern in such matters, which were
all under the control of God, but presently broke out of Urdu into familiar
Punjabi, the mere sound of which had a rustic smack of village smoke-reek and
plough-tail, as he denounced the wearers of white coats, the jugglers with
words who filched his field from him, the men whose backs were never bowed in
honest work; and poured ironical scorn on the Bengali. He and one of his
brothers had seen Calcutta, and being at work there had Bengali carpenters
given to them as assistants.
"Those carpenters!" said Bishen Singh. "Black apes were more efficient
workmates, and as for the Bengali babu--tchick!" The guttural click needed no
interpretation, but Orde translated the rest, while Pagett gazed with interest
at the wood-carver.
"He seems to have a most illiberal prejudice against the Bengali," said the
M.P.
"Yes, it's very sad that for ages outside Bengal there should he so bitter a
prejudice. Pride of race, which also means race-hatred, is the plague and
curse of India and it spreads far," Orde pointed with his riding-whip to the
large map of India on the veranda wall.
"See! I begin with the North," said he. "There's the Afghan, and, as a
highlander, he despises all the dwellers in Hindoostan--with the exception of
the Sikh, whom he hates as cordially as the Sikh hates him. The Hindu loathes
Sikh and Afghan, and the Rajput--that's a little lower down across this yellow
blot of desert--has a strong objection, to put it mildly, to the Maratha who,
by the way, poisonously hates the Afghan. Let's go North a minute. The Sindhi
hates everybody I've mentioned. Very good, we'll take less warlike races. The
cultivator of Northern India domineers over the man in the next province, and
the Behari of the Northwest ridicules the Bengali. They are all at one on that
point. I'm giving you merely the roughest possible outlines of the facts, of
course."
Bishen Singh, his clean cut nostrils still quivering, watched the large sweep
of the whip as it traveled from the frontier, through Sindh, the Punjab and
Rajputana, till it rested by the valley of the Jumna.
"Hate -eternal and inextinguishable hate," concluded Orde, flicking the lash
of the whip across the large map from East to West as he sat down. "Remember
Canning's advice to Lord Granville, 'Never write or speak of Indian things
without looking at a map.'"
Pagett opened his eyes, Orde resumed. "And the race-hatred is only a part of
it. What's really the matter with Bishen Singh is class-hatred, which,
unfortunately, is even more intense and more widely spread. That's one of the
little drawbacks of caste, which some of your recent English writers find an
impeccable system."
The wood-carver was glad to be recalled to the business of his craft, and his
eyes shone as he received instructions for a carved wooden doorway for Pagett,
which he promised should be splendidly executed and despatched to England in
six months. It is an irrelevant detail, but in spite of Orde's reminders,
fourteen months elapsed before the work was finished. Business over, Bishen
Singh hung about, reluctant to take his leave, and at last joining his hands
and approaching Orde with bated breath and whispering humbleness, said he had
a petition to make. Orde's face suddenly lost all trace of expression. "Speak
on, Bishen Singh," said he, and the carver in a whining tone explained that
his case against his brothers was fixed for hearing before a native judge and-
-here he dropped his voice still lower till he was summarily stopped by Orde,
who sternly pointed to the gate with an emphatic Begone!
Bishen Singh, showing but little sign of discomposure, salaamed respectfully
to the friends and departed.
Pagett looked inquiry; Orde, with complete recovery of his usual urbanity,
replied: "It's nothing, only the old story, he wants his case to be tried by
an English judge--they all do that--but when he began to hint that the other
side were in improper relations with the native judge I had to shut him up.
Gunga Ram, the man he wanted to make insinuations about, may not be very
bright; but he's as honest as daylight on the bench. But that's just what one
can't get a native to believe."
"Do you really mean to say these people prefer to have their cases tried by
English judges?"
"Why, certainly."
Pagett drew a long breath. "I didn't know that before." At this point a
phaeton entered the compound, and Orde rose with "Confound it, there's old
Rasul Ali Khan come to pay one of his tiresome duty calls. I'm afraid we shall
never get through our little Congress discussion."
Pagett was an almost silent spectator of the grave formalities of a visit paid
by a punctilious old Mahommedan gentleman to an Indian official; and was much
impressed by the distinction of manner and fine appearance of the Mohammedan
landholder. When the exchange of polite banalities came to a pause, he
expressed a wish to learn the courtly visitor's opinion of the National
Congress.
Orde reluctantly interpreted, and with a smile which even Mohammedan
politeness could not save from bitter scorn, Rasul Ali Khan intimated that he
knew nothing about it and cared still less. It was a kind of talk encouraged
by the Government for some mysterious purpose of its own, and for his own part
he wondered and held his peace.
Pagett was far from satisfied with this, and wished to have the old
gentleman's opinion on the propriety of managing all Indian affairs on the
basis of an elective system.
Orde did his best to explain, but it was plain the visitor was bored and
bewildered. Frankly, he didn't think much of committees; they had a Municipal
Committee at Lahore and had elected a menial servant, an orderly, as a member.
He had been informed of this on good authority, and after that, committees had
ceased to interest him. But all was according to the rule of Government, and,
please God, it was all for the best.
"What an old fossil it is!" cried Pagett, as Orde returned from seeing his
guest to the door; "just like some old blue-blooded hidalgo of Spain. What
does he really think of the Congress after all, and of the elective system?"
"Hates it all like poison. When you are sure of a majority, election is a fine
system; but you can scarcely expect the Mahommedans, the most masterful and
powerful minority in the country, to contemplate their own extinction with
joy. The worst of it is that he and his co-religionists, who are many, and the
landed proprietors, also, of Hindu race, are frightened and put out by this
election business and by the importance we have bestowed on lawyers, pleaders,
writers, and the like, who have, up to now, been in abject submission to them.
They say little, but after all they are the most important fagots in the great
bundle of communities, and all the glib bunkum in the world would not pay for
their estrangement. They have controlled the land."
"But I am assured that experience of local self-government in your
municipalities has been most satisfactory, and when once the principle is
accepted in your centres, don't you know, it is bound to spread, and these
important--ah--people of yours would learn it like the rest. I see no
difficulty at all," and the smooth lips closed with the complacent snap
habitual to Pagett, M.P., the "man of cheerful yesterdays and confident
tomorrows."
Orde looked at him with a dreary smile.
"The privilege of election has been most reluctantly withdrawn from scores of
municipalities, others have had to be summarily suppressed, and, outside the
Presidency towns, the actual work done has been badly performed. This is of
less moment, perhaps--it only sends up the local death-rates--than the fact
that the public interest in municipal elections, never very strong, has waned,
and is waning, in spite of careful nursing on the part of Government
servants."
"Can you explain this lack of interest?" said Pagett, putting aside the rest
of Orde's remarks.
"You may find a ward of the key in the fact that only one in every thousand of
our population can spell. Then they are infinitely more interested in religion
and caste questions than in any sort of politics. When the business of mere
existence is over, their minds are occupied by a series of interests,
pleasures, rituals, superstitions, and the like, based on centuries of
tradition and usage. You, perhaps, find it hard to conceive of people
absolutely devoid of curiosity, to whom the book, the daily paper, and the
printed speech are unknown, and you would describe their life as blank. That's
a profound mistake. You are in another land, another century, down on the bed-
rock of society, where the family merely, and not the community, is all-
important. The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His
life, too, is more complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low-
thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but
it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse,
and to forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book. 'The corn
and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the will of God.' Why should
such folk look up from their immemorially appointed round of duty and
interests to meddle with the unknown and fuss with voting-papers. How would
you, atop of all your interests care to conduct even one-tenth of your life
according to the manners and customs of the Papuans, let's say? That's what it
comes to."
"But if they won't take the trouble to vote, why do you anticipate that
Mohammedans, proprietors, and the rest would be crushed by majorities of
them?"
Again Pagett disregarded the closing sentence.
"Because, though the landholders would not move a finger on any purely
political question, they could be raised in dangerous excitement by religious
hatreds. Already the first note of this has been sounded by the people who are
trying to get up an agitation on the cow-killing question, and every year
there is trouble over the Mohammedan Muharrum processions.
"But who looks after the popular rights, being thus unrepresented?"
"The Government of Her Majesty the Queen, Empress of India, in which, if the
Congress promoters are to be believed, the people have an implicit trust; for
the Congress circular, specially prepared for rustic comprehension, says the
movement is 'for the remission of tax, the advancement of Hindustan, and the
strengthening of the British Government.' This paper is headed in large
letters-'MAY THE PROSPERITY OF THE EMPIRE OF INDIA ENDURE.'"
"Really!" said Pagett, "that shows some cleverness. But there are things
better worth imitation in our English methods of--er--political statement than
this sort of amiable fraud."
"Anyhow," resumed Orde, "you perceive that not a word is said about elections
and the elective principle, and the reticence of the Congress promoters here
shows they are wise in their generation."
"But the elective principle must triumph in the end, and the little
difficulties you seem to anticipate would give way on the introduction of a
well-balanced scheme, capable of indefinite extension."
"But is it possible to devise a scheme which, always assuming that the people
took any interest in it, without enormous expense, ruinous dislocation of the
administration and danger to the public peace, can satisfy the aspirations of
Mr. Hume and his following, and yet safeguard the interests of the
Mahommedans, the landed and wealthy classes, the Conservative Hindus, the
Eurasians, Parsees, Sikhs, Rajputs, native Christians, domiciled Europeans and
others, who are each important and powerful in their way?"
Pagett's attention, however, was diverted to the gate, where a group of
cultivators stood in apparent hesitation.
"Here are the twelve Apostles, hy Jove--come straight out of Raffaele's
cartoons," said the M.P., with the fresh appreciation of a newcomer.
Orde, loth to be interrupted, turned impatiently toward the villagers, and
their leader, handing his long staff to one of his companions, advanced to the
house.
"It is old Jelbo, the Lumherdar, or head-man of Pind Sharkot, and a very
intelligent man for a villager."
The Jat farmer had removed his shoes and stood smiling on the edge of the
veranda. His strongly marked features glowed with russet bronze, and his
bright eyes gleamed under deeply set brows, contracted by lifelong exposure to
sunshine. His beard and moustache streaked with grey swept from bold cliffs of
brow and cheek in the large sweeps one sees drawn by Michael Angelo, and
strands of long black hair mingled with the irregularly piled wreaths and
folds of his turban. The drapery of stout blue cotton cloth thrown over his
broad shoulders and girt round his narrow loins, hung from his tall form in
broadly sculptured folds, and he would have made a superb model for an artist
in search of a patriarch.
Orde greeted him cordially, and after a polite pause the countryman started
off with a long story told with impressive earnestness. Orde listened and
smiled, interrupting the speaker at times to argue and reason with him in a
tone which Pagett could hear was kindly, and finally checking the flux of
words was about to dismiss him, when Pagett suggested that he should be asked
about the National Congress.
But Jelbo had never heard of it. He was a poor man and such things, by the
favor of his Honor, did not concern him.
"What's the matter with your big friend that he was so terribly in earnest?"
asked Pagett, when he had left.
"Nothing much. He wants the blood of the people in the next village, who have
had smallpox and cattle plague pretty badly, and by the help of a wizard, a
currier, and several pigs have passed it on to his own village. 'Wants to know
if they can't be run in for this awful crime. It seems they made a dreadful
charivari at the village boundary, threw a quantity of spell-bearing objects
over the border, a buffalo's skull and other things; then branded a chamur--
what you would call a currier--on his hinder parts and drove him and a number
of pigs over into Jelbo's village. Jelbo says he can bring evidence to prove
that the wizard directing these proceedings, who is a Sansi, has been guilty
of theft, arson, cattle-killing, perjury and murder, but would prefer to have
him punished for bewitching them and inflicting smallpox."
"And how on earth did you answer such a lunatic?"
"Lunatic!--the old fellow is as sane as you or I; and he has some ground of
complaint against those Sansis. I asked if he would like a native
superintendent of police with some men to make inquiries, but he objected on
the grounds the police were rather worse than smallpox and criminal tribes put
together."
"Criminal tribes--er--I don't quite understand," said Pagett.
"We have in India many tribes of people who in the slack anti-British days
became robbers, in various kind, and preyed on the people. They are being
restrained and reclaimed little by little, and in time will become useful
citizens, but they still cherish hereditary traditions of crime, and are a
difficult lot to deal with. By the way what about the political rights of
these folk under your schemes? The country people call them vermin, but I
suppose they would be electors with the rest."
"Nonsense--special provision would be made for them in a well-considered
electoral scheme, and they would doubtless be treated with fitting severity,"
said Pagett, with a magisterial air.
"Severity, yes--but whether it would be fitting is doubtful. Even those poor
devils have rights, and, after all, they only practice what they have been
taught."
"But criminals, Orde!"
"Yes, criminals with codes and rituals of crime, gods and godlings of crime,
and a hundred songs and sayings in praise of it. Puzzling, isn't it?"
"It's simply dreadful. They ought to be put down at once. Are there many of
them?"
"Not more than about sixty thousand in this province, for many of the tribes
broadly described as criminal are really vagabond and criminal only on
occasion, while others are being settled and reclaimed. They are of great
antiquity, a legacy from the past, the golden, glorious Aryan past of Max
Muller, Birdwood and the rest of your spindrift philosophers."
An orderly brought a card to Orde, who took it with a movement of irritation
at the interruption, and banded it to Pagett; a large card with a ruled border
in red ink, and in the centre in schoolboy copper plate, Mr. Dma Nath. "Give
salaam," said the civilian, and there entered in haste a slender youth, clad
in a closely fitting coat of grey homespun, tight trousers, patent-leather
shoes, and a small black velvet cap. His thin cheek twitched, and his eyes
wandered restlessly, for the young man was evidently nervous and
uncomfortable, though striving to assume a free and easy air.
"Your honor may perhaps remember me," he said in English, and Orde scanned him
keenly.
"I know your face somehow. You belonged to the Shershah district I think, when
I was in charge there?"
"Yes, Sir, my father is writer at Shershah, and your honor gave me a prize
when I was first in the Middle School examination five years ago. Since then I
have prosecuted my studies, and I am now second year's student in the Mission
College--"
"Of course: you are Kedar Nath's son--the boy who said he liked geography
better than play or sugar cakes, and I didn't believe you. How is your father
getting on?"
"He is well, and he sends his salaam, but his circumstances are depressed, and
he also is down on his luck."
"You learn English idioms at the Mission College, it seems."
"Yes, sir, they are the best idioms, and my father ordered me to ask your
honor to say a word for him to the present incumbent of your honor's shoes,
the latchet of which he is not worthy to open, and who knows not Joseph; for
things are different at Shershah now, and my father wants promotion."
"Your father is a good man, and I will do what I can for him."
At this point a telegram was handed to Orde, who, after glancing at it, said
he must leave his young friend whom he introduced to Pagett, "a member of the
English House of Commons who wishes to learn about India."
Orde had scarcely retired with his telegram when Pagett began:
"Perhaps you can tell me something of the National Congress movement?"
"Sir, it is the greatest movement of modern times, and one in which all
educated men like us must join. All our students are for the Congress."
"Excepting, I suppose, Mahommedans, and the Christians?" said Pagett, quick to
use his recent instruction.
"These are some mere exceptions to the universal rule."
"But the people outside the College, the working classes, the agriculturists;
your father and mother, for instance."
"My mother," said the young man, with a visible effort to bring himself to
pronounce the word, "has no ideas, and my father is not agriculturist, nor
working class; he is of the Kayeth caste; but he had not the advantage of a
collegiate education, and he does not know much of the Congress. It is a
movement for the educated young-man"--connecting adjective and noun in a sort
of vocal hyphen.
"Ah, yes," said Pagett, feeling he was a little off the rails, "and what are
the benefits you expect to gain by it?"
"Oh, sir, everything. England owes its greatness to Parliamentary
institutions, and we should at once gain the same high position in scale of
nations. Sir, we wish to have the sciences, the arts, the manufactures, the
industrial factories, with steam engines, and other motive powers and public
meetings, and debates. Already we have a debating club in connection with the
college, and elect a Mr. Speaker. Sir, the progress must come. You also are a
Member of Parliament and worship the great Lord Ripon," said the youth,
breathlessly, and his black eyes flashed as he finished his commaless
sentences.
"Well," said Pagett, drily, "it has not yet occurred to me to worship his
Lordship, although I believe he is a very worthy man, and I am not sure that
England owes quite all the things you name to the House of Commons. You see,
my young friend, the growth of a nation like ours is slow, subject to many
influences, and if you have read your history aright"--
"Sir. I know it all--all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymede,
Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and I have read
something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Reynolds'
'Mysteries of the Court,' and"--
Pagett felt like one who had pulled the string of a shower-bath unawares, and
hastened to stop the torrent with a question as to what particular grievances
of the people of India the attention of an elected assembly should be first
directed. But young Mr. Dma Nath was slow to particularize. There were many,
very many demanding consideration. Mr. Pagett would like to hear of one or two
typical examples. The Repeal of the Arms Act was at last named, and the
student learned for the first time that a license was necessary before an
Englishman could carry a gun in England. Then natives of India ought to be
allowed to become Volunteer Riflemen if they chose, and the absolute equality
of the Oriental with his European fellow-subject in civil status should be
proclaimed on principle, and the Indian Army should be considerably reduced.
The student was not, however, prepared with answers to Mr. Pagett's mildest
questions on these points, and he returned to vague generalities, leaving the
M.P. so much impressed with the crudity of his views that he was glad on
Orde's return to say goodbye to his "very interesting" young friend.
"What do you think of young India?" asked Orde.
"Curious, very curious--and callow."
"And yet," the civilian replied, "one can scarcely help sympathizing with him
for his mere youth's sake. The young orators of the Oxford Union arrived at
the same conclusions and showed doubtless just the same enthusiasm. If there
were any political analogy between India and England, if the thousand races of
this Empire were one, if there were any chance even of their learning to speak
one language, if, in short, India were a Utopia of the debating-room, and not
a real land, this kind of talk might be worth listening to, but it is all
based on false analogy and ignorance of the facts."
"But he is a native and knows the facts."
"He is a sort of English schoolboy, but married three years, and the father of
two weaklings, and knows less than most English schoolboys. You saw all he is
and knows, and such ideas as he has acquired are directly hostile to the most
cherished convictions of the vast majority of the people."
"But what does he mean by saying he is a student of a mission college? Is he a
Christian?"
"He meant just what he said, and he is not a Christian, nor ever will he be.
Good people in America, Scotland and England, most of whom would never dream
of collegiate education for their own sons, are pinching themselves to bestow
it in pure waste on Indian youths. Their scheme is an oblique, subterranean
attack on heathenism; the theory being that with the jam of secular education,
leading to a University degree, the pill of moral or religious instruction may
he coaxed down the heathen gullet."
"But does it succeed; do they make converts?"
"They make no converts, for the subtle Oriental swallows the jam and rejects
the pill; but the mere example of the sober, righteous, and godly lives of the
principals and professors who are most excellent and devoted men, must have a
certain moral value. Yet, as Lord Lansdowne pointed out the other day, the
market is dangerously overstocked with graduates of our Universities who look
for employment in the administration. An immense number are employed, but year
by year the college mills grind out increasing lists of youths foredoomed to
failure and disappointment, and meanwhile, trades, manufactures, and the
industrial arts are neglected, and in fact regarded with contempt by our new
literary mandarins in posse."
"But our young friend said he wanted steam-engines and factories," said
Pagett.
"Yes, he would like to direct such concerns. He wants to begin at the top, for
manual labor is held to be discreditable, and he would never defile his hands
by the apprenticeship which the architects, engineers, and manufacturers of
England cheerfully undergo; and he would be aghast to learn that the leading
names of industrial enterprise in England belonged a generation or two since,
or now belong, to men who wrought with their own hands. And, though he talks
glibly of manufacturers, he refuses to see that the Indian manufacturer of the
future will be the despised workman of the present. It was proposed, for
example, a few weeks ago, that a certain municipality in this province should
establish an elementary technical school for the sons of workmen. The stress
of the opposition to the plan came from a pleader who owed all he had to a
college education bestowed on him gratis by Government and missions. You would
have fancied some fine old crusted Tory squire of the last generation was
speaking. 'These people,' he said, 'want no education, for they learn their
trades from their fathers, and to teach a workman's son the elements of
mathematics and physical science would give him ideas above his business. They
must be kept in their place, and it was idle to imagine that there was any
science in wood or iron work.' And he carried his point. But the Indian
workman will rise in the social scale in spite of the new literary caste."
"In England we have scarcely begun to realize that there is an industrial
class in this country, yet, I suppose, the example of men, like Edwards for
instance, must tell," said Pagett, thoughtfully.
"That you shouldn't know much about it is natural enough, for there are but
few sources of information. India in this, as in other respects, is like a
badly kept ledger--not written up to date. And men like Edwards are, in
reality, missionaries, who by precept and example are teaching more lessons
than they know. Only a few, however, of their crowds of subordinates seem to
care to try to emulate them, and aim at individual advancement; the rest drop
into the ancient Indian caste groove."
"How do you mean?" asked Pagett.
"Well, it is found that the new railway and factory workmen, the fitter, the
smith, the engine-driver, and the rest are already forming separate hereditary
castes. You may notice this down at Jamalpur in Bengal, one of the oldest
railway centres; and at other places, and in other industries, they are
following the same inexorable Indian law."
"Which means?" queried Pagett.
"It means that the rooted habit of the people is to gather in small self-
contained, self-sufficing family groups with no thought or care for any
interests but their own--a habit which is scarcely compatible with the right
acceptation of the elective principle."
"Yet you must admit, Orde, that though our young friend was not able to
expound the faith that is in him, your Indian army is too big."
"Not nearly big enough for its main purpose. And, as a side issue, there are
certain powerful minorities of fighting folk whose interests an Asiatic
Government is bound to consider. Arms is as much a means of livelihood as
civil employ under Government and law. And it would be a heavy strain on
British bayonets to hold down Sikhs, Jats, Bilochis, Rohillas, Rajputs, Bhils,
Dogras, Pathans, and Gurkhas to abide by the decisions of a numerical majority
opposed to their interests. Leave the 'numerical majority' to itself without
the British bayonets--a flock of sheep might as reasonably hope to manage a
troop of collies."
"This complaint about excessive growth of the army is akin to another
contention of the Congress party. They protest against the malversation of the
whole of the moneys raised by additional taxes as a Famine Insurance Fund to
other purposes. You must be aware that this special Famine Fund has all been
spent on frontier roads and defences and strategic railway schemes as a
protection against Russia."
"But there was never a special famine fund raised by special taxation and put
by as in a box. No sane administrator would dream of such a thing. In a time
of prosperity a finance minister, rejoicing in a margin, proposed to annually
apply a million and a half to the construction of railways and canals for the
protection of districts liable to scarcity, and to the reduction of the annual
loans for public works. But times were not always prosperous, and the finance
minister had to choose whether be would bang up the insurance scheme for a
year or impose fresh taxation. When a farmer hasn't got the little surplus he
hoped to have for buying a new wagon and draining a low-lying field corner,
you don't accuse him of malversation, if he spends what he has on the
necessary work of the rest of his farm."
A clatter of hoofs was heard, and Orde looked up with vexation, but his brow
cleared as a horseman halted under the porch.
"Hello, Orde! just looked in to ask if you are coming to polo on Tuesday: we
want you badly to help to crumple up the Krab Bokhar team."
Orde explained that he had to go out into the District, and while the visitor
complained that though good men wouldn't play, duffers were always keen, and
that his side would probably be beaten, Pagett rose to look at his mount, a
red, lathered Biloch mare, with a curious lyrelike incurving of the ears.
"Quite a little thoroughbred in all other respects," said the M.P., and Orde
presented Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager of the Siad and Sialkote Bank to his
friend.
"Yes, she's as good as they make 'em, and she's all the female I possess and
spoiled in consequence, aren't you, old girl?" said Burke, patting the mare's
glossy neck as she backed and plunged.
"Mr. Pagett," said Orde, "has been asking me about the Congress. What is your
opinion?" Burke turned to the M. P. with a frank smile.
"Well, if it's all the same to you, sir, I should say, Damn the Congress, but
then I'm no politician, but only a business man."
"You find it a tiresome subject?"
"Yes, it's all that, and worse than that, for this kind of agitation is
anything but wholesome for the country."
"How do you mean?"
"It would be a long job to explain, and Sara here won't stand, but you know
how sensitive capital is, and how timid investors are. All this sort of rot is
likely to frighten them, and we can't afford to frighten them. The passengers
aboard an Ocean steamer don't feel reassured when the ship's way is stopped,
and they hear the workmen's hammers tinkering at the engines down below. The
old Ark's going on all right as she is, and only wants quiet and room to move.
Them's my sentiments, and those of some other people who have to do with money
and business."
"Then you are a thick-and-thin supporter of the Government as it is."
"Why, no! The Indian Government is much too timid with its money--like an old
maiden aunt of mine--always in a funk about her investments. They don't spend
half enough on railways for instance, and they are slow in a general way, and
ought to be made to sit up in all that concerns the encouragement of private
enterprise, and coaxing out into use the millions of capital that lie dormant
in the country."
The mare was dancing with impatience, and Burke was evidently anxious to be
off, so the men wished him goodbye.
"Who is your genial friend who condemns both Congress and Government in a
breath?" asked Pagett, with an amused smile.
"Just now he is Reggie Burke, keener on polo than on anything else, but if you
go to the Sind and Sialkote Bank tomorrow you would find Mr. Reginald Burke a
very capable man of business, known and liked by an immense constituency North
and South of this."
"Do you think he is right about the Government's want of enterprise?"
"I should hesitate to say. Better consult the merchants and chambers of
commerce in Cawnpore, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. But though these bodies
would like, as Reggie puts it, to make Government sit up, it is an elementary
consideration in governing a country like India, which must be administered
for the benefit of the people at large, that the counsels of those who resort
to it for the sake of making money should be judiciously weighed and not
allowed to overpower the rest. They are welcome guests here, as a matter of
course, but it has been found best to restrain their influence. Thus the
rights of plantation laborers, factory operatives, and the like, have been
protected, and the capitalist, eager to get on, has not always regarded
Government action with favor. It is quite conceivable that under an elective
system the commercial communities of the great towns might find means to
secure majorities on labor questions and on financial matters."
"They would act at least with intelligence and consideration."
"Intelligence, yes; but as to consideration, who at the present moment most
bitterly resents the tender solicitude of Lancashire for the welfare and
protection of the Indian factory operative? English and native capitalists
running cotton mills and factories."
"But is the solicitude of Lancashire in this matter entirely disinterested?"
"It is no business of mine to say. I merely indicate an example of how a
powerful commercial interest might hamper a Government intent in the first
place on the larger interests of humanity."
Orde broke off to listen a moment. "There's Dr. Lathrop talking to my wife in
the drawing-room," said he.
"Surely not; that's a lady's voice, and if my ears don't deceive me, an
American."
"Exactly, Dr. Eva McCreery Lathrop, chief of the new Women's Hospital here,
and a very good fellow forbye. Good morning, Doctor," he said, as a graceful
figure came out on the veranda, "you seem to be in trouble. I hope Mrs. Orde
was able to help you."
"Your wife is real kind and good, I always come to her when I'm in a fix but I
fear it's more than comforting I want."
"You work too hard and wear yourself out," said Orde, kindly. "Let me
introduce my friend, Mr. Pagett, just fresh from home, and anxious to learn
his India. You could tell him something of that more important half of which a
mere man knows so little."
"Perhaps I could if I'd any heart to do it, but I'm in trouble, I've lost a
case, a case that was doing well, through nothing in the world but inattention
on the part of a nurse I had begun to trust. And when I spoke only a small
piece of my mind she collapsed in a whining heap on the floor. It is
hopeless."
The men were silent, for the blue eyes of the lady doctor were dim. Recovering
herself she looked up with a smile, half sad, half humorous, "And I am in a
whining heap, too; but what phase of Indian life are you particularly
interested in, sir?"
"Mr. Pagett intends to study the political aspect of things and the
possibility of bestowing electoral institutions on the people."
"Wouldn't it be as much to the purpose to bestow point-lace collars on them?
They need many things more urgently than votes. Why it's like giving a bread-
pill for a broken leg."
"Er--I don't quite follow," said Pagett, uneasily.
"Well, what's the matter with this country is not in the least political, but
an all round entanglement of physical, social, and moral evils and
corruptions, all more or less due to the unnatural treatment of women. You
can't gather figs from thistles, and so long as the system of infant marriage,
the prohibition of the remarriage of widows, the lifelong imprisonment of
wives and mothers in a worse than penal confinement, and the withholding from
them of any kind of education or treatment as rational beings continues, the
country can't advance a step. Half of it is morally dead, and worse than dead,
and that's just the half from which we have a right to look for the best
impulses. It's right here where the trouble is, and not in any political
considerations whatsoever."
"But do they marry so early?" said Pagett, vaguely.
"The average age is seven, but thousands are married still earlier. One result
is that girls of twelve and thirteen have to bear the burden of wifehood and
motherhood, and, as might be expected, the rate of mortality both for mothers
and children is terrible. Pauperism, domestic unhappiness, and a low state of
health are only a few of the consequences of this. Then, when, as frequently
happens, the boy-husband dies prematurely, his widow is condemned to worse
than death. She may not remarry, must live a secluded and despised life, a
life so unnatural that she sometimes prefers suicide; more often she goes
astray. You don't know in England what such words as 'infant-marriage,' 'baby-
wife,' 'girl-mother,' and 'virgin-widow' mean; but they mean unspeakable
horrors here."
"Well, but the advanced political party here will surely make it their
business to advocate social reforms as well as political ones," said Pagett.
"Very surely they will do no such thing," said the lady doctor, emphatically.
"I wish I could make you understand. Why, even of the funds devoted to the
Marchioness of Dufferin's organization for medical aid to the women of India,
it was said in print and in speech, that they would be better spent on more
college scholarships for men. And in all the advanced parties' talk--God
forgive them--and in all their programmes, they carefully avoid all such
subjects. They will talk about the protection of the cow, for that's an
ancient superstition--they can all understand that; but the protection of the
women is a new and dangerous idea." She turned to Pagett impulsively:
"You are a member of the English Parliament. Can you do nothing? The
foundations of their life are rotten--utterly and bestially rotten. I could
tell your wife things that I couldn't tell you. I know the inner life that
belongs to the native, and I know nothing else; and believe me you might as
well try to grow golden-rod in a mushroom-pit as to make anything of a people
that are born and reared as these--these things 're. The men talk of their
rights and privileges. I have seen the women that bear these very men, and
again--may God forgive the men!"
Pagett's eyes opened with a large wonder. Dr. Lathrop rose tempestuously.
"I must be off to lecture," said she, "and I'm sorry that I can't show you my
hospitals; but you had better believe, sir, that it's more necessary for India
than all the elections in creation."
"That's a woman with a mission, and no mistake," said Pagett, after a pause.
"Yes; she believes in her work, and so do I," said Orde. "I've a notion that
in the end it will be found that the most helpful work done for India in this
generation was wrought by Lady Dufferin in drawing attention--what work that
was, by the way, even with her husband's great name to back it to the needs of
women here. In effect, native habits and beliefs are an organized conspiracy
against the laws of health and happy life--but there is some dawning of hope
now."
"How d'you account for the general indifference, then?"
"I suppose it's due in part to their fatalism and their utter indifference to
all human suffering. How much do you imagine the great province of the Punjab
with over twenty million people and half a score rich towns has contributed to
the maintenance of civil dispensaries last year? About seven thousand rupees."
"That's seven hundred pounds," said Pagett, quickly.
"I wish it was," replied Orde; "but anyway, it's an absurdly inadequate sum,
and shows one of the blank sides of Oriental character."
Pagett was silent for a long time. The question of direct and personal pain
did not lie within his researches. He preferred to discuss the weightier
matters of the law, and contented himself with murmuring: "They'll do better
later on." Then, with a rush, returning to his first thought:
"But, my dear Orde, if it's merely a class movement of a local and temporary
character, how d' you account for Bradlaugh, who is at least a man of sense,
taking it up?"
"I know nothing of the champion of the New Brahmins but what I see in the
papers. I suppose there is something tempting in being hailed by a large
assemblage as the representative of the aspirations of two hundred and fifty
millions of people. Such a man looks 'through all the roaring and the
wreaths,' and does not reflect that it is a false perspective, which, as a
matter of fact, hides the real complex and manifold India from his gaze. He
can scarcely be expected to distinguish between the ambitions of a new
oligarchy and the real wants of the people of whom he knows nothing. But it's
strange that a professed Radical should come to be the chosen advocate of a
movement which has for its aim the revival of an ancient tyranny. Shows how
even Radicalism can fall into academic grooves and miss the essential truths
of its own creed. Believe me, Pagett, to deal with India you want first-hand
knowledge and experience. I wish he would come and live here for a couple of
years or so."
"Is not this rather an ad hominem style of argument?"
"Can't help it in a case like this. Indeed, I am not sure you ought not to go
further and weigh the whole character and quality and upbringing of the man.
You must admit that the monumental complacency with which he trotted out his
ingenious little Constitution for India showed a strange want of imagination
and the sense of humor."
"No, I don't quite admit it," said Pagett.
"Well, you know him and I don't, but that's how it strikes a stranger." He
turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. "And, after all, the
burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men
out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation
without responsibility, and we--well, perhaps, when you've seen a little more
of India you'll understand. To begin with, our death rate's five times higher
than yours--I speak now for the brutal bureaucrat--and we work on the refuse
of worked-out cities and exhausted civilizations, among the bones of the dead.
In the case of the Congress meetings, the only notable fact is that the
priests of the altar are British, not Buddhist, Jain or Brahminical, and that
the whole thing is a British contrivance kept alive by the efforts of Messrs.
Hume, Eardley, Norton, and Digby."
"You mean to say, then, it's not a spontaneous movement?"
"What movement was ever spontaneous in any true sense of the word? This seems
to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal about it; try
it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy
criterion, and there is scarcely the color of money in it. The delegates write
from England that they are out of pocket for working expenses, railway fares,
and stationery--the mere pasteboard and scaffolding of their show. It is, in
fact, collapsing from mere financial inanition."
"But you cannot deny that the people of India, who are, perhaps, too poor to
subscribe, are mentally and morally moved by the agitation," Pagett insisted.
"That is precisely what I do deny. The native side of the movement is the work
of a limited class, a microscopic minority, as Lord Dufferin described it,
when compared with the people proper, but still a very interesting class,
seeing that it is of our own creation. It is composed almost entirely of those
of the literary or clerkly castes who have received an English education."
"Surely that's a very important class. Its members must be the ordained
leaders of popular thought."
"Anywhere else they might be leaders, but they have no social weight here."
Pagett laughed. "That's an epigrammatic way of putting it, Orde."
"Is it? Let's see," said the Deputy Commissioner of Amara, striding into the
sunshine toward a half-naked gardener potting roses. He took the man's hoe,
and went to a rain-scarped bank at the bottom of the garden.
"Come here, Pagett," he said, and cut at the sun-baked soil. After three
strokes there rolled from under the blade of the hoe the half of a clanking
skeleton that settled at Pagett's feet in an unseemly jumble of bones. The
M.P. drew back.
"Our houses are built on cemeteries," said Orde. "There are scores of
thousands of graves within ten miles."
Pagett was contemplating the skull with the awed fascination of a man who has
but little to do with the dead. "India's a very curious place," said he, after
a pause.
"Ah? You'll know all about it in three months. Come in to lunch," said Orde.
VOLUME V PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
LISPETH
Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!
To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
--The Convert.
She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their
maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just
above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned
Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. The Kotgarh
Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and "Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari
pronunciation.
Later, cholera came into the Kotgarh Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh,
and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife of the then
Chaplain of Kotgarh. This was after the reign of the Moravian missionaries,
but before Kotgarh had quite forgotten her title of "Mistress of the Northern
Hills."
Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people
would have done as much for her under any circumstances, I do not know; but
she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she is worth traveling
fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greek face--one of
those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom. She was of a pale, ivory
color and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were
wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the abominable print-cloths
affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hill-side unexpectedly,
have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay.
Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when she reached
womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated her because she had,
they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain's wife
did not know what to do with her. Somehow, one cannot ask a stately goddess,
five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played with the
Chaplain's children and took classes in the Sunday School, and read all the
books in the house, and grew more and more beautiful, like the Princesses in
fairy tales. The Chaplain's wife said that the girl ought to take service in
Simla as a nurse or something "genteel." But Lispeth did not want to take
service. She was very happy where she was.
When travellers--there were not many in those years--came to Kotgarh, Lispeth
used to lock herself into her own room for fear they might take her away to
Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.
One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth went out for
a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies--a mile and a half
out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty and thirty miles in her
little constitutionals, all about and about, between Kotgarh and Narkunda.
This time she came back at full dusk, stepping down the breakneck descent into
Kotgarh with something heavy in her arms. The Chaplain's wife was dozing in
the drawing-room when Lispeth came in breathing hard and very exhausted with
her burden. Lispeth put it down on the sofa, and said simply:
"This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself. We
will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry him to me."
This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonial views, and
the Chaplain's wife shrieked with horror. However, the man on the sofa needed
attention first. He was a young Englishman, and his head had been cut to the
bone by something jagged. Lispeth said she had found him down the khud, so she
had brought him in.
He was breathing queerly and was unconscious.
He was put to bed and tended by the Chaplain, who knew something of medicine;
and Lispeth waited outside the door in case she could be useful. She explained
to the Chaplain that this was the man she meant to marry; and the Chaplain and
his wife lectured her severely on the impropriety of her conduct. Lispeth
listened quietly, and repeated her first proposition. It takes a great deal of
Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in
love at first sight. Lispeth, having found the man she worshipped, did not see
why she should keep silent as to her choice. She had no intention of being
sent away, either. She was going to nurse that Englishman until he was well
enough to marry her. This was her little programme.
After a fortnight of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishman recovered
coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, and Lispeth--especially
Lispeth--for their kindness. He was a traveller in the East, he said--they
never talked about "globe-trotters" in those days, when the P. & O. fleet was
young and small--and had come from Dehra Dun to hunt for plants and
butterflies among the Simla hills. No one at Simla, therefore, knew anything
about him. He fancied he must have fallen over the cliff while stalking a fern
on a rotten tree-trunk, and that his coolies must have stolen his baggage and
fled. He thought he would go back to Simla when he was a little stronger. He
desired no more mountaineering.
He made small haste to go away, and recovered his strength slowly.
Lispeth objected to being advised either by the Chaplain or his wife; so the
latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood in Lispeth's
heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and romantic, a
perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to a girl at Home, he
fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he would behave with discretion.
He did that. Still he found it very pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with
Lispeth, and say nice things to her, and call her pet names while he was
getting strong enough to go away. It meant nothing at all to him, and
everything in the world to Lispeth. She was very happy while the fortnight
lasted, because she had found a man to love.
Being a savage by birth, she took no trouble to hide her feelings, and the
Englishman was amused. When he went away, Lispeth walked with him, up the Hill
as far as Narkunda, very troubled and very miserable. The Chaplain's wife,
being a good Christian and disliking anything in the shape of fuss or scandal-
-Lispeth was beyond her management entirely--had told the Englishman to tell
Lispeth that he was coming back to marry her. "She is but a child, you know,
and, I fear, at heart a heathen," said the Chaplain's wife. So all the twelve
miles up the hill the Englishman, with his arm around Lispeth's waist, was
assuring the girl that he would come back and marry her; and Lispeth made him
promise over and over again. She wept on the Narkunda Ridge till he had passed
out of sight along the Muttiani path.
Then she dried her tears and went in to Kotgarh again, and said to the
Chaplain's wife: "He will come back and marry me. He has gone to his own
people to tell them so." And the Chaplain's wife soothed Lispeth and said: "He
will come back." At the end of two months, Lispeth grew impatient, and was
told that the Englishman had gone over the seas to England. She knew where
England was, because she had read little geography primers; but, of course,
she had no conception of the nature of the sea, being a Hill girl.
There was an old puzzle-map of the World in the House. Lispeth had played with
it when she was a child. She unearthed it again, and put it together of
evenings, and cried to herself, and tried to imagine where her Englishman was.
As she had no ideas of distance or steamboats, her notions were somewhat
erroneous. It would not have made the least difference had she been perfectly
correct; for the Englishman had no intention of coming back to marry a Hill
girl. He forgot all about her by the time he was butterfly-hunting in Assam.
He wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth's name did not appear.
At the end of three months, Lispeth made daily pilgrimage to Narkunda to see
if her Englishman was coming along the road. It gave her comfort, and the
Chaplain's wife, finding her happier, thought that she was getting over her
"barbarous and most indelicate folly." A little later the walks ceased to help
Lispeth and her temper grew very bad. The Chaplain's wife thought this a
profitable time to let her know the real state of affairs--that the Englishman
had only promised his love to keep her quiet--that he had never meant
anything, and that it was "wrong and improper" of Lispeth to think of marriage
with an Englishman, who was of a superior clay, besides being promised in
marriage to a girl of his own people. Lispeth said that all this was clearly
impossible, because he had said he loved her, and the Chaplain's wife had,
with her own lips, asserted that the Englishman was coming back.
"How can what he and you said be untrue?" asked Lispeth.
"We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child," said the Chaplain's wife.
"Then you have lied to me," said Lispeth, "you and he?"
The Chaplain's wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was silent, too
for a little time; then she went out down the valley, and returned in the
dress of a Hill girl--infamously dirty, but without the nose and ear rings.
She had her hair braided into the long pig-tail, helped out with black thread,
that Hill women wear.
"I am going back to my own people," said she. "You have killed Lispeth. There
is only left old Jadeh's daughter--the daughter of a pahari and the servant of
Tarka Devi. You are all liars, you English."
By the time that the Chaplain's wife had recovered from the shock of the
announcement that Lispeth had 'verted to her mother's gods, the girl had gone;
and she never came back.
She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up the arrears of
the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time, she married a wood-
cutter who beat her, after the manner of paharis, and her beauty faded soon.
"There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the heathen,"
said the Chaplain's wife, "and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an
infidel." Seeing she had been taken into the Church of England at the mature
age of five weeks, this statement does not do credit to the Chaplain's wife.
Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She always had a perfect command
of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimes be induced to
tell the story of her first love-affair.
It was hard then to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, so like a
wisp of charred rag, could ever have been "Lispeth of the Kotgarh Mission."
THREE AND--AN EXTRA.
"When halter and heel ropes are slipped, do not give chase with sticks but
with gram."
--Punjabi Proverb.
After marriage arrives a reaction, sometimes a big, sometimes a little one;
but it comes sooner or later, and must be tided over by both parties if they
desire the rest of their lives to go with the current.
In the case of the Cusack-Bremmils this reaction did not set in till the third
year after the wedding. Bremmil was hard to hold at the best of times; but he
was a beautiful husband until the baby died and Mrs. Bremmil wore black, and
grew thin, and mourned as if the bottom of the universe had fallen out.
Perhaps Bremmil ought to have comforted her. He tried to do so, I think; but
the more he comforted the more Mrs. Bremmil grieved, and, consequently, the
more uncomfortable Bremmil grew. The fact was that they both needed a tonic.
And they got it. Mrs. Bremmil can afford to laugh now, but it was no laughing
matter to her at the time.
You see, Mrs. Hauksbee appeared on the horizon; and where she existed was fair
chance of trouble. At Simla her bye-name was the "Stormy Petrel." She had won
that title five times to my own certain knowledge. She was a little, brown,
thin, almost skinny, woman, with big, rolling, violet-blue eyes, and the
sweetest manners in the world. You had only to mention her name at afternoon
teas for every woman in the room to rise up, and call her--well--NOT blessed.
She was clever, witty, brilliant, and sparkling beyond most of her kind; but
possessed of many devils of malice and mischievousness. She could be nice,
though, even to her own sex. But that is another story.
Bremmil went off at score after the baby's death and the general discomfort
that followed, and Mrs. Hauksbee annexed him. She took no pleasure in hiding
her captives. She annexed him publicly, and saw that the public saw it. He
rode with her, and walked with her, and talked with her, and picnicked with
her, and tiffined at Peliti's with her, till people put up their eyebrows and
said: "Shocking!" Mrs. Bremmil stayed at home turning over the dead baby's
frocks and crying into the empty cradle. She did not care to do anything else.
But some eight dear, affectionate lady-friends explained the situation at
length to her in case she should miss the cream of it. Mrs. Bremmil listened
quietly, and thanked them for their good offices. She was not as clever as
Mrs. Hauksbee, but she was no fool. She kept her own counsel, and did not
speak to Bremmil of what she had heard. This is worth remembering. Speaking
to, or crying over, a husband never did any good yet.
When Bremmil was at home, which was not often, he was more affectionate than
usual; and that showed his hand. The affection was forced partly to soothe his
own conscience and partly to soothe Mrs. Bremmil. It failed in both regards.
Then "the A.-D.-C. in Waiting was commanded by Their Excellencies, Lord and
Lady Lytton, to invite Mr. and Mrs. Cusack-Bremmil to Peterhoff on July 26th
at 9.30 P. M."--"Dancing" in the bottom-left-hand corner.
"I can't go," said Mrs. Bremmil, "it is too soon after poor little Florrie--
but it need not stop you, Tom."
She meant what she said then, and Bremmil said that he would go just to put in
an appearance. Here he spoke the thing which was not; and Mrs. Bremmil knew
it. She guessed--a woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty-
-that he had meant to go from the first, and with Mrs. Hauksbee. She sat down
to think, and the outcome of her thoughts was that the memory of a dead child
was worth considerably less than the affections of a living husband.
She made her plan and staked her all upon it. In that hour she discovered that
she knew Tom Bremmil thoroughly, and this knowledge she acted on.
"Tom," said she, "I shall be dining out at the Longmores' on the evening of
the 26th. You'd better dine at the club."
This saved Bremmil from making an excuse to get away and dine with Mrs.
Hauksbee, so he was grateful, and felt small and mean at the same time--which
was wholesome. Bremmil left the house at five for a ride. About half-past five
in the evening a large leather-covered basket came in from Phelps' for Mrs.
Bremmil. She was a woman who knew how to dress; and she had not spent a week
on designing that dress and having it gored, and hemmed, and herring-boned,
and tucked and rucked (or whatever the terms are) for nothing. It was a
gorgeous dress--slight mourning. I can't describe it, but it was what The
Queen calls "a creation"--a thing that hit you straight between the eyes and
made you gasp. She had not much heart for what she was going to do; but as she
glanced at the long mirror she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had
never looked so well in her life. She was a large blonde and, when she chose,
carried herself superbly.
After the dinner at the Longmores, she went on to the dance--a little late--
and encountered Bremmil with Mrs. Hauksbee on his arm.
That made her flush, and as the men crowded round her for dances she looked
magnificent. She filled up all her dances except three, and those she left
blank. Mrs. Hauksbee caught her eye once; and she knew it was war--real war--
between them. She started handicapped in the struggle, for she had ordered
Bremmil about just the least little bit in the world too much; and he was
beginning to resent it. Moreover, he had never seen his wife look so lovely.
He stared at her from doorways, and glared at her from passages as she went
about with her partners; and the more he stared, the more taken was he. He
could scarcely believe that this was the woman with the red eyes and the black
stuff gown who used to weep over the eggs at breakfast.
Mrs. Hauksbee did her best to hold him in play, but, after two dances, he
crossed over to his wife and asked for a dance.
"I'm afraid you've come too late, MISTER Bremmil," she said, with her eyes
twinkling.
Then he begged her to give him a dance, and, as a great favor, she allowed him
the fifth waltz. Luckily it stood vacant on his programme. They danced it
together, and there was a little flutter round the room. Bremmil had a sort of
notion that his wife could dance, but he never knew she danced so divinely. At
the end of that waltz he asked for another--as a favor, not as a right; and
Mrs. Bremmil said: "Show me your programme, dear!" He showed it as a naughty
little schoolboy hands up contraband sweets to a master.
There was a fair sprinkling of "H" on it besides "H" at supper.
Mrs. Bremmil said nothing, but she smiled contemptuously, ran her pencil
through 7 and 9--two "H's"--and returned the card with her own name written
above--a pet name that only she and her husband used. Then she shook her
finger at him, and said, laughing: "Oh, you silly, SILLY boy!"
Mrs. Hauksbee heard that, and--she owned as much--felt that she had the worst
of it. Bremmil accepted 7 and 9 gratefully. They danced 7, and sat out 9 in
one of the little tents. What Bremmil said and what Mrs. Bremmil said is no
concern of any one's.
When the band struck up "The Roast Beef of Old England," the two went out into
the verandah, and Bremmil began looking for his wife's dandy (this was before
'rickshaw days) while she went into the cloak-room. Mrs. Hauksbee came up and
said: "You take me in to supper, I think, Mr. Bremmil." Bremmil turned red and
looked foolish. "Ah--h'm! I'm going home with my wife, Mrs. Hauksbee. I think
there has been a little mistake." Being a man, he spoke as though Mrs.
Hauksbee were entirely responsible.
Mrs. Bremmil came out of the cloak-room in a swansdown cloak with a white
"cloud" round her head. She looked radiant; and she had a right to.
The couple went off in the darkness together, Bremmil riding very close to the
dandy.
Then says Mrs. Hauksbee to me--she looked a trifle faded and jaded in the
lamplight: "Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man;
but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool."
Then we went in to supper.
THROWN AWAY.
"And some are sulky, while some will plunge
[So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!]
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge.
[There! There! Who wants to kill you?]
Some--there are losses in every trade--
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made,
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard."
--Toolungala Stockyard Chorus.
To rear a boy under what parents call the "sheltered life system" is, if the
boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in
a thousand he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and
may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper
proportions of things.
Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked boot. He
chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that blacking and Old Brown
Windsor make him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not
wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of
biting big dogs' ears. Being young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six
months, a well-mannered little beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been
kept away from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-
grown and with developed teeth, just consider how fearfully sick and thrashed
he would be! Apply that motion to the "sheltered life," and see how it works.
It does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the "sheltered life"
theory; and the theory killed him dead. He stayed with his people all his
days, from the hour he was born till the hour he went into Sandhurst nearly at
the top of the list. He was beautifully taught in all that wins marks by a
private tutor, and carried the extra weight of "never having given his parents
an hour's anxiety in his life." What he learnt at Sandhurst beyond the regular
routine is of no great consequence. He looked about him, and he found soap and
blacking, so to speak, very good. He ate a little, and came out of Sandhurst
not so high as he went in.
Them there was an interval and a scene with his people, who expected much from
him. Next a year of living "unspotted from the world" in a third-rate depot
battalion where all the juniors were children, and all the seniors old women;
and lastly he came out to India, where he was cut off from the support of his
parents, and had no one to fall back on in time of trouble except himself.
Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too
seriously--the midday sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy
kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.
Flirtation does not matter because every one is being transferred and either
you or she leave the Station, and never return. Good work does not matter,
because a man is judged by his worst output and another man takes all the
credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do
worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements
do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished
them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another person's money.
Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the day's work, and if you die
another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between
death and burial. Nothing matters except Home furlough and acting allowances,
and these only because they are scarce. This is a slack, kutcha country where
all men work with imperfect instruments; and the wisest thing is to take no
one and nothing in earnest, but to escape as soon as ever you can to some
place where amusement is amusement and a reputation worth the having.
But this Boy--the tale is as old as the Hills--came out, and took all things
seriously. He was pretty and was petted. He took the pettings seriously, and
fretted over women not worth saddling a pony to call upon. He found his new
free life in India very good.
It DOES look attractive in the beginning, from a Subaltern's point of view--
all ponies, partners, dancing, and so on. He tasted it as the puppy tastes the
soap. Only he came late to the eating, with a growing set of teeth. He had no
sense of balance--just like the puppy--and could not understand why he was not
treated with the consideration he received under his father's roof. This hurt
his feelings.
He quarrelled with other boys, and, being sensitive to the marrow, remembered
these quarrels, and they excited him. He found whist, and gymkhanas, and
things of that kind (meant to amuse one after office) good; but he took them
seriously too, just as he took the "head" that followed after drink. He lost
his money over whist and gymkhanas because they were new to him.
He took his losses seriously, and wasted as much energy and interest over a
two-gold-mohur race for maiden ekka-ponies with their manes hogged, as if it
had been the Derby. One-half of this came from inexperience--much as the puppy
squabbles with the corner of the hearth-rug--and the other half from the
dizziness bred by stumbling out of his quiet life into the glare and
excitement of a livelier one. No one told him about the soap and the blacking
because an average man takes it for granted that an average man is ordinarily
careful in regard to them. It was pitiful to watch The Boy knocking himself to
pieces, as an over-handled colt falls down and cuts himself when he gets away
from the groom.
This unbridled license in amusements not worth the trouble of breaking line
for, much less rioting over, endured for six months--all through one cold
weather--and then we thought that the heat and the knowledge of having lost
his money and health and lamed his horses would sober The Boy down, and he
would stand steady. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this would have
happened. You can see the principle working in any Indian Station. But this
particular case fell through because The Boy was sensitive and took things
seriously--as I may have said some seven times before. Of course, we couldn't
tell how his excesses struck him personally.
They were nothing very heart-breaking or above the average. He might be
crippled for life financially, and want a little nursing.
Still the memory of his performances would wither away in one hot weather, and
the shroff would help him to tide over the money troubles. But he must have
taken another view altogether and have believed himself ruined beyond
redemption. His Colonel talked to him severely when the cold weather ended.
That made him more wretched than ever; and it was only an ordinary "Colonel's
wigging!"
What follows is a curious instance of the fashion in which we are all linked
together and made responsible for one another. THE thing that kicked the beam
in The Boy's mind was a remark that a woman made when he was talking to her.
There is no use in repeating it, for it was only a cruel little sentence,
rapped out before thinking, that made him flush to the roots of his hair. He
kept himself to himself for three days, and then put in for two days' leave to
go shooting near a Canal Engineer's Rest House about thirty miles out. He got
his leave, and that night at Mess was noisier and more offensive than ever. He
said that he was "going to shoot big game, and left at half-past ten o'clock
in an ekka.
Partridge--which was the only thing a man could get near the Rest House--is
not big game; so every one laughed.
Next morning one of the Majors came in from short leave, and heard that The
Boy had gone out to shoot "big game." The Major had taken an interest in The
Boy, and had, more than once, tried to check him in the cold weather. The
Major put up his eyebrows when he heard of the expedition and went to The
Boy's room, where he rummaged.
Presently he came out and found me leaving cards on the Mess.
There was no one else in the ante-room.
He said: "The Boy has gone out shooting. DOES a man shoot
@tetur with a revolver and a writing-case?"
I said: "Nonsense, Major!" for I saw what was in his mind.
He said: "Nonsense or nonsense, I'm going to the Canal now--at once. I don't
feel easy."
Then he thought for a minute, and said: "Can you lie?"
"You know best," I answered. "It's my profession."
"Very well," said the Major; "you must come out with me now--at once--in an
ekka to the Canal to shoot black-buck. Go and put on shikar-kit--quick--and
drive here with a gun."
The Major was a masterful man; and I knew that he would not give orders for
nothing. So I obeyed, and on return found the Major packed up in an ekka--gun-
cases and food slung below--all ready for a shooting-trip.
He dismissed the driver and drove himself. We jogged along quietly while in
the station; but as soon as we got to the dusty road across the plains, he
made that pony fly. A country-bred can do nearly anything at a pinch. We
covered the thirty miles in under three hours, but the poor brute was nearly
dead.
Once I said: "What's the blazing hurry, Major?"
He said, quietly: "The Boy has been alone, by himself, for--one, two, five--
fourteen hours now! I tell you, I don't feel easy."
This uneasiness spread itself to me, and I helped to beat the pony.
When we came to the Canal Engineer's Rest House the Major called for The Boy's
servant; but there was no answer. Then we went up to the house, calling for
The Boy by name; but there was no answer.
"Oh, he's out shooting," said I.
Just then I saw through one of the windows a little hurricane-lamp burning.
This was at four in the afternoon. We both stopped dead in the verandah,
holding our breath to catch every sound; and we heard, inside the room, the
"brr--brr--brr" of a multitude of flies. The Major said nothing, but he took
off his helmet and we entered very softly.
The Boy was dead on the charpoy in the centre of the bare, lime- washed room.
He had shot his head nearly to pieces with his revolver. The gun-cases were
still strapped, so was the bedding, and on the table lay The Boy's writing-
case with photographs. He had gone away to die like a poisoned rat!
The Major said to himself softly: "Poor Boy! Poor, POOR devil!" Then he turned
away from the bed and said: "I want your help in this business."
Knowing The Boy was dead by his own hand, I saw exactly what that help would
be, so I passed over to the table, took a chair, lit a cheroot, and began to
go through the writing-case; the Major looking over my shoulder and repeating
to himself: "We came too late!--Like a rat in a hole!--Poor, POOR devil!"
The Boy must have spent half the night in writing to his people, and to his
Colonel, and to a girl at Home; and as soon as he had finished, must have shot
himself, for he had been dead a long time when we came in.
I read all that he had written, and passed over each sheet to the Major as I
finished it.
We saw from his accounts how very seriously he had taken everything. He wrote
about "disgrace which he was unable to bear"--"indelible shame"--"criminal
folly"--"wasted life," and so on; besides a lot of private things to his
Father and Mother too much too sacred to put into print. The letter to the
girl at Home was the most pitiful of all; and I choked as I read it. The Major
made no attempt to keep dry-eyed. I respected him for that. He read and rocked
himself to and fro, and simply cried like a woman without caring to hide it.
The letters were so dreary and hopeless and touching. We forgot all about The
Boy's follies, and only thought of the poor Thing on the charpoy and the
scrawled sheets in our hands. It was utterly impossible to let the letters go
Home.
They would have broken his Father's heart and killed his Mother after killing
her belief in her son.
At last the Major dried his eyes openly, and said: "Nice sort of thing to
spring on an English family! What shall we do?"
I said, knowing what the Major had brought me but for: "The Boy died of
cholera. We were with him at the time. We can't commit ourselves to half-
measures. Come along."
Then began one of the most grimy comic scenes I have ever taken part in--the
concoction of a big, written lie, bolstered with evidence, to soothe The Boy's
people at Home. I began the rough draft of a letter, the Major throwing in
hints here and there while he gathered up all the stuff that The Boy had
written and burnt it in the fireplace. It was a hot, still evening when we
began, and the lamp burned very badly. In due course I got the draft to my
satisfaction, setting forth how The Boy was the pattern of all virtues,
beloved by his regiment, with every promise of a great career before him, and
so on; how we had helped him through the sickness--it was no time for little
lies, you will understand--and how he had died without pain. I choked while I
was putting down these things and thinking of the poor people who would read
them.
Then I laughed at the grotesqueness of the affair, and the laughter mixed
itself up with the choke--and the Major said that we both wanted drinks.
I am afraid to say how much whiskey we drank before the letter was finished.
It had not the least effect on us. Then we took off The Boy's watch, locket,
and rings.
Lastly, the Major said: "We must send a lock of hair too. A woman values
that."
But there were reasons why we could not find a lock fit to send.
The Boy was black-haired, and so was the Major, luckily. I cut off a piece of
the Major's hair above the temple with a knife, and put it into the packet we
were making. The laughing-fit and the chokes got hold of me again, and I had
to stop. The Major was nearly as bad; and we both knew that the worst part of
the work was to come.
We sealed up the packet, photographs, locket, seals, ring, letter, and lock of
hair with The Boy's sealing-wax and The Boy's seal.
Then the Major said: "For God's sake let's get outside--away from the room--
and think!"
We went outside, and walked on the banks of the Canal for an hour, eating and
drinking what we had with us, until the moon rose. I know now exactly how a
murderer feels. Finally, we forced ourselves back to the room with the lamp
and the Other Thing in it, and began to take up the next piece of work. I am
not going to write about this. It was too horrible. We burned the bedstead and
dropped the ashes into the Canal; we took up the matting of the room and
treated that in the same way. I went off to a village and borrowed two big
hoes--I did not want the villagers to help--while the Major arranged--the
other matters. It took us four hours' hard work to make the grave. As we
worked, we argued out whether it was right to say as much as we remembered of
the Burial of the Dead.
We compromised things by saying the Lord's Prayer with a private unofficial
prayer for the peace of the soul of The Boy. Then we filled in the grave and
went into the verandah--not the house--to lie down to sleep. We were dead-
tired.
When we woke the Major said, wearily: "We can't go back till tomorrow. We must
give him a decent time to die in. He died early THIS morning, remember. That
seems more natural." So the Major must have been lying awake all the time,
thinking.
I said: "Then why didn't we bring the body back to the cantonments?"
The Major thought for a minute:--"Because the people bolted when they heard of
the cholera. And the ekka has gone!"
That was strictly true. We had forgotten all about the ekka-pony, and he had
gone home.
So, we were left there alone, all that stifling day, in the Canal Rest House,
testing and re-testing our story of The Boy's death to see if it was weak at
any point. A native turned up in the afternoon, but we said that a Sahib was
dead of cholera, and he ran away. As the dusk gathered, the Major told me all
his fears about The Boy, and awful stories of suicide or nearly-carried-out
suicide--tales that made one's hair crisp. He said that he himself had once
gone into the same Valley of the Shadow as the Boy, when he was young and new
to the country; so he understood how things fought together in The Boy's poor
jumbled head. He also said that youngsters, in their repentant moments,
consider their sins much more serious and ineffaceable than they really are.
We talked together all through the evening, and rehearsed the story of the
death of The Boy. As soon as the moon was up, and The Boy, theoretically, just
buried, we struck across country for the Station. We walked from eight till
six o'clock in the morning; but though we were dead-tired, we did not forget
to go to The Boy's room and put away his revolver with the proper amount of
cartridges in the pouch. Also to set his writing-case on the table. We found
the Colonel and reported the death, feeling more like murderers than ever.
Then we went to bed and slept the clock round; for there was no more in us.
The tale had credence as long as was necessary, for every one forgot about The
Boy before a fortnight was over. Many people, however, found time to say that
the Major had behaved scandalously in not bringing in the body for a
regimental funeral. The saddest thing of all was a letter from The Boy's
mother to the Major and me--with big inky blisters all over the sheet. She
wrote the sweetest possible things about our great kindness, and the
obligation she would be under to us as long as she lived.
All things considered, she WAS under an obligation; but not exactly as she
meant.
MISS YOUGHAL'S SAIS.
When Man and Woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?
--Mahomedan Proverb.
Some people say that there is no romance in India. Those people are wrong. Our
lives hold quite as much romance as is good for us.
Sometimes more.
Strickland was in the Police, and people did not understand him; so they said
he was a doubtful sort of man and passed by on the other side. Strickland had
himself to thank for this. He held the extraordinary theory that a Policeman
in India should try to know as much about the natives as the natives
themselves. Now, in the whole of Upper India, there is only ONE man who can
pass for Hindu or Mohammedan, chamar or faquir, as he pleases. He is feared
and respected by the natives from the Ghor Kathri to the Jamma Musjid; and he
is supposed to have the gift of invisibility and executive control over many
Devils. But what good has this done him with the Government? None in the
world. He has never got Simla for his charge; and his name is almost unknown
to Englishmen.
Strickland was foolish enough to take that man for his model; and, following
out his absurd theory, dabbled in unsavory places no respectable man would
think of exploring--all among the native riff-raff. He educated himself in
this peculiar way for seven years, and people could not appreciate it. He was
perpetually "going Fantee" among the natives, which, of course, no man with
any sense believes in. He was initiated into the Sat Bhai at Allahabad once,
when he was on leave; he knew the Lizard-Song of the Sansis, and the Halli-
Hukk dance, which is a religious can-can of a startling kind. When a man knows
who dances the Halli-Hukk, and how, and when, and where, he knows something to
be proud of. He has gone deeper than the skin. But Strickland was not proud,
though he had helped once, at Jagadhri, at the Painting of the Death Bull,
which no Englishman must even look upon; had mastered the thieves'-patter of
the changars; had taken a Eusufzai horse-thief alone near Attock; and had
stood under the mimbar-board of a Border mosque and conducted service in the
manner of a Sunni Mollah.
His crowning achievement was spending eleven days as a faquir in the gardens
of Baba Atal at Amritsar, and there picking up the threads of the great
Nasiban Murder Case. But people said, justly enough: "Why on earth can't
Strickland sit in his office and write up his diary, and recruit, and keep
quiet, instead of showing up the incapacity of his seniors?" So the Nasiban
Murder Case did him no good departmentally; but, after his first feeling of
wrath, he returned to his outlandish custom of prying into native life. By the
way, when a man once acquires a taste for this particular amusement, it abides
with him all his days. It is the most fascinating thing in the world; Love not
excepted. Where other men took ten days to the Hills, Strickland took leave
for what he called shikar, put on the disguise that appealed to him at the
time, stepped down into the brown crowd, and was swallowed up for a while. He
was a quiet, dark young fellow--spare, black-eyes--and, when he was not
thinking of something else, a very interesting companion. Strickland on Native
Progress as he had seen it was worth hearing. Natives hated Strickland; but
they were afraid of him. He knew too much.
When the Youghals came into the station, Strickland--very gravely, as he did
everything--fell in love with Miss Youghal; and she, after a while, fell in
love with him because she could not understand him. Then Strickland told the
parents; but Mrs. Youghal said she was not going to throw her daughter into
the worst paid Department in the Empire, and old Youghal said, in so many
words, that he mistrusted Strickland's ways and works, and would thank him not
to speak or write to his daughter any more. "Very well," said Strickland, for
he did not wish to make his lady-love's life a burden. After one long talk
with Miss Youghal he dropped the business entirely.
The Youghals went up to Simla in April.
In July, Strickland secured three months' leave on "urgent private affairs."
He locked up his house--though not a native in the Providence would wittingly
have touched "Estreekin Sahib's" gear for the world--and went down to see a
friend of his, an old dyer, at Tarn Taran.
Here all trace of him was lost, until a sais met me on the Simla Mall with
this extraordinary note:
"Dear old man,
Please give bearer a box of cheroots--Supers, No. I, for preference. They are
freshest at the Club. I'll repay when I reappear; but at present I'm out of
Society.
Yours,
E. STRICKLAND."
I ordered two boxes, and handed them over to the sais with my love.
That sais was Strickland, and he was in old Youghal's employ, attached to Miss
Youghal's Arab. The poor fellow was suffering for an English smoke, and knew
that whatever happened I should hold my tongue till the business was over.
Later on, Mrs. Youghal, who was wrapped up in her servants, began talking at
houses where she called of her paragon among saises--the man who was never too
busy to get up in the morning and pick flowers for the breakfast-table, and
who blacked--actually BLACKED--the hoofs of his horse like a London coachman!
The turnout of Miss Youghal's Arab was a wonder and a delight. Strickland--
Dulloo, I mean--found his reward in the pretty things that Miss Youghal said
to him when she went out riding. Her parents were pleased to find she had
forgotten all her foolishness for young Strickland and said she was a good
girl.
Strickland vows that the two months of his service were the most rigid mental
discipline he has ever gone through. Quite apart from the little fact that the
wife of one of his fellow-saises fell in love with him and then tried to
poison him with arsenic because he would have nothing to do with her, he had
to school himself into keeping quiet when Miss Youghal went out riding with
some man who tried to flirt with her, and he was forced to trot behind
carrying the blanket and hearing every word! Also, he had to keep his temper
when he was slanged in "Benmore" porch by a policeman--especially once when he
was abused by a Naik he had himself recruited from Isser Jang village--or,
worse still, when a young subaltern called him a pig for not making way
quickly enough.
But the life had its compensations. He obtained great insight into the ways
and thefts of saises--enough, he says, to have summarily convicted half the
chamar population of the Punjab if he had been on business. He became one of
the leading players at knuckle-bones, which all jhampanis and many saises play
while they are waiting outside the Government House or the Gaiety Theatre of
nights; he learned to smoke tobacco that was three-fourths cowdung; and he
heard the wisdom of the grizzled Jemadar of the Government House saises, whose
words are valuable. He saw many things which amused him; and he states, on
honor, that no man can appreciate Simla properly, till he has seen it from the
sais's point of view.
He also says that, if he chose to write all he saw, his head would be broken
in several places.
Strickland's account of the agony he endured on wet nights, hearing the music
and seeing the lights in "Benmore," with his toes tingling for a waltz and his
head in a horse-blanket, is rather amusing. One of these days, Strickland is
going to write a little book on his experiences. That book will be worth
buying; and even more, worth suppressing.
Thus, he served faithfully as Jacob served for Rachel; and his leave was
nearly at an end when the explosion came. He had really done his best to keep
his temper in the hearing of the flirtations I have mentioned; but he broke
down at last. An old and very distinguished General took Miss Youghal for a
ride, and began that specially offensive "you're-only-a-little-girl" sort of
flirtation--most difficult for a woman to turn aside deftly, and most
maddening to listen to. Miss Youghal was shaking with fear at the things he
said in the hearing of her sais. Dulloo--Strickland--stood it as long as he
could. Then he caught hold of the General's bridle, and, in most fluent
English, invited him to step off and be heaved over the cliff. Next minute
Miss Youghal began crying; and Strickland saw that he had hopelessly given
himself away, and everything was over.
The General nearly had a fit, while Miss Youghal was sobbing out the story of
the disguise and the engagement that wasn't recognized by the parents.
Strickland was furiously angry with himself and more angry with the General
for forcing his hand; so he said nothing, but held the horse's head and
prepared to thrash the General as some sort of satisfaction, but when the
General had thoroughly grasped the story, and knew who Strickland was, he
began to puff and blow in the saddle, and nearly rolled off with laughing. He
said Strickland deserved a V. C., if it were only for putting on a sais's
blanket. Then he called himself names, and vowed that he deserved a thrashing,
but he was too old to take it from Strickland. Then he complimented Miss
Youghal on her lover.
The scandal of the business never struck him; for he was a nice old man, with
a weakness for flirtations. Then he laughed again, and said that old Youghal
was a fool. Strickland let go of the cob's head, and suggested that the
General had better help them, if that was his opinion. Strickland knew
Youghal's weakness for men with titles and letters after their names and high
official position.
"It's rather like a forty-minute farce," said the General, "but begad, I WILL
help, if it's only to escape that tremendous thrashing I deserved. Go along to
your home, my sais-Policeman, and change into decent kit, and I'll attack Mr.
Youghal. Miss Youghal, may I ask you to canter home and wait?
. . . . . . . . .
About seven minutes later, there was a wild hurroosh at the Club.
A sais, with a blanket and head-rope, was asking all the men he knew: "For
Heaven's sake lend me decent clothes!" As the men did not recognize him, there
were some peculiar scenes before Strickland could get a hot bath, with soda in
it, in one room, a shirt here, a collar there, a pair of trousers elsewhere,
and so on. He galloped off, with half the Club wardrobe on his back, and an
utter stranger's pony under him, to the house of old Youghal.
The General, arrayed in purple and fine linen, was before him.
What the General had said Strickland never knew, but Youghal received
Strickland with moderate civility; and Mrs. Youghal, touched by the devotion
of the transformed Dulloo, was almost kind.
The General beamed, and chuckled, and Miss Youghal came in, and almost before
old Youghal knew where he was, the parental consent had been wrenched out and
Strickland had departed with Miss Youghal to the Telegraph Office to wire for
his kit. The final embarrassment was when an utter stranger attacked him on
the Mall and asked for the stolen pony.
So, in the end, Strickland and Miss Youghal were married, on the strict
understanding that Strickland should drop his old ways, and stick to
Departmental routine, which pays best and leads to Simla.
Strickland was far too fond of his wife, just then, to break his word, but it
was a sore trial to him; for the streets and the bazars, and the sounds in
them, were full of meaning to Strickland, and these called to him to come back
and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I will tell you how
he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by
this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting
the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift
of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must always continue to
learn.
But he fills in his Departmental returns beautifully.
YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER.
I am dying for you, and you are dying for another.
--Punjabi Proverb.
When the Gravesend tender left the P. & 0. steamer for Bombay and went back to
catch the train to Town, there were many people in it crying. But the one who
wept most, and most openly was Miss Agnes Laiter. She had reason to cry,
because the only man she ever loved--or ever could love, so she said--was
going out to India; and India, as every one knows, is divided equally between
jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys.
Phil Garron, leaning over the side of the steamer in the rain, felt very
unhappy too; but he did not cry. He was sent out to "tea." What "tea" meant he
had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he would have to ride on a prancing
horse over hills covered with tea-vines, and draw a sumptuous salary for doing
so; and he was very grateful to his uncle for getting him the berth. He was
really going to reform all his slack, shiftless ways, save a large proportion
of his magnificent salary yearly, and, in a very short time, return to marry
Agnes Laiter. Phil Garron had been lying loose on his friends' hands for three
years, and, as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell in love. He was very
nice; but he was not strong in his views and opinions and principles, and
though he never came to actual grief his friends were thankful when he said
good-bye, and went out to this mysterious "tea" business near Darjiling. They
said:--"God bless you, dear boy! Let us never see your face again,"--or at
least that was what Phil was given to understand.
When he sailed, he was very full of a great plan to prove himself several
hundred times better than any one had given him credit for--to work like a
horse, and triumphantly marry Agnes Laiter. He had many good points besides
his good looks; his only fault being that he was weak, the least little bit in
the world weak. He had as much notion of economy as the Morning Sun; and yet
you could not lay your hand on any one item, and say: "Herein Phil Garron is
extravagant or reckless." Nor could you point out any particular vice in his
character; but he was "unsatisfactory" and as workable as putty.
Agnes Laiter went about her duties at home--her family objected to the
engagement--with red eyes, while Phil was sailing to Darjiling--"a port on the
Bengal Ocean," as his mother used to tell her friends. He was popular enough
on board ship, made many acquaintances and a moderately large liquor bill, and
sent off huge letters to Agnes Laiter at each port. Then he fell to work on
this plantation, somewhere between Darjiling and Kangra, and, though the
salary and the horse and the work were not quite all he had fancied, he
succeeded fairly well, and gave himself much unnecessary credit for his
perseverance.
In the course of time, as he settled more into collar, and his work grew fixed
before him, the face of Agnes Laiter went out of his mind and only came when
he was at leisure, which was not often. He would forget all about her for a
fortnight, and remember her with a start, like a school-boy who has forgotten
to learn his lesson.
She did not forget Phil, because she was of the kind that never forgets. Only,
another man--a really desirable young man--presented himself before Mrs.
Laiter; and the chance of a marriage with Phil was as far off as ever; and his
letters were so unsatisfactory; and there was a certain amount of domestic
pressure brought to bear on the girl; and the young man really was an eligible
person as incomes go; and the end of all things was that Agnes married him,
and wrote a tempestuous whirlwind of a letter to Phil in the wilds of
Darjiling, and said she should never know a happy moment all the rest of her
life. Which was a true prophecy.
Phil got that letter, and held himself ill-treated. This was two years after
he had come out; but by dint of thinking fixedly of Agnes Laiter, and looking
at her photograph, and patting himself on the back for being one of the most
constant lovers in history, and warming to the work as he went on, he really
fancied that he had been very hardly used. He sat down and wrote one final
letter--a really pathetic "world without end, amen," epistle; explaining how
he would be true to Eternity, and that all women were very much alike, and he
would hide his broken heart, etc., etc.; but if, at any future time, etc.,
etc., he could afford to wait, etc., etc., unchanged affections, etc., etc.,
return to her old love, etc., etc., for eight closely-written pages. From an
artistic point of view, it was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, who
knew the state of Phil's real feelings--not the ones he rose to as he went on
writing--would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfish work of a
thoroughly mean and selfish, weak man. But this verdict would have been
incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word he had written for
at least two days and a half.
It was the last flicker before the light went out.
That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put it away in
her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of her family. Which is
the first duty of every Christian maid.
Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as an artist
thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad, but they were not
altogether good until they brought him across Dunmaya, the daughter of a
Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army. The girl had a strain of Hill
blood in her, and, like the Hill women, was not a purdah nashin. Where Phil
met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter. She was a good girl and
handsome, and, in her way, very clever and shrewd; though, of course, a little
hard. It is to be remembered that Phil was living very comfortably, denying
himself no small luxury, never putting by an anna, very satisfied with himself
and his good intentions, was dropping all his English correspondents one by
one, and beginning more and more to look upon this land as his home. Some men
fall this way; and they are of no use afterwards. The climate where he was
stationed was good, and it really did not seem to him that there was anything
to go Home for.
He did what many planters have done before him--that is to say, he made up his
mind to marry a Hill girl and settle down. He was seven and twenty then, with
a long life before him, but no spirit to go through with it. So he married
Dunmaya by the forms of the English Church, and some fellow-planters said he
was a fool, and some said he was a wise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest
girl, and, in spite of her reverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable
estimate of her husband's weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in
less than a year, a very passable imitation of an English lady in dress and
carriage. [It is curious to think that a Hill man, after a lifetime's
education, is a Hill man still; but a Hill woman can in six months master most
of the ways of her English sisters. There was a coolie woman once. But that is
another story.] Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, and looked
well.
Meantime the letter lay in Agnes's desk, and now and again she would think of
poor resolute hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers of Darjiling,
toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Her husband was
worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of the heart. Three years after
he was married--and after he had tried Nice and Algeria for his complaint--he
went to Bombay, where he died, and set Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she
looked on his death and the place of it, as a direct interposition of
Providence, and when she had recovered from the shock, she took out and reread
Phil's letter with the "etc., etc.," and the big dashes, and the little
dashes, and kissed it several times. No one knew her in Bombay; she had her
husband's income, which was a large one, and Phil was close at hand. It was
wrong and improper, of course, but she decided, as heroines do in novels, to
find her old lover, to offer him her hand and her gold, and with him spend the
rest of her life in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She sat for two
months, alone in Watson's Hotel, elaborating this decision, and the picture
was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron, Assistant on a
tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceable name.
. . . . . . . . .
She found him. She spent a month over it,, for his plantation was not in the
Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very little altered,
and Dunmaya was very nice to her.
Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, who
really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya, and more
than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to have spoilt.
Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will be ultimately
saved from perdition through her training.
Which is manifestly unfair.
FALSE DAWN.
Tonight God knows what thing shall tide,
The Earth is racked and faint--
Expectant, sleepless, open-eyed;
And we, who from the Earth were made,
Thrill with our Mother's pain.
--In Durance.
No man will ever know the exact truth of this story; though women may
sometimes whisper it to one another after a dance, when they are putting up
their hair for the night and comparing lists of victims. A man, of course,
cannot assist at these functions. So the tale must be told from the outside--
in the dark--all wrong.
Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching
the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women
first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.
Saumarez knew this when he made up his mind to propose to the elder Miss
Copleigh. Saumarez was a strange man, with few merits, so far as men could
see, though he was popular with women, and carried enough conceit to stock a
Viceroy's Council and leave a little over for the Commander-in-Chief's Staff.
He was a Civilian. Very many women took an interest in Saumarez, perhaps,
because his manner to them was offensive. If you hit a pony over the nose at
the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you, but he will take a deep
interest in your movements ever afterwards. The elder Miss Copleigh was nice,
plump, winning and pretty. The younger was not so pretty, and, from men
disregarding the hint set forth above, her style was repellant and
unattractive. Both girls had, practically, the same figure, and there was a
strong likeness between them in look and voice; though no one could doubt for
an instant which was the nicer of the two.
Saumarez made up his mind, as soon as they came into the station from Behar,
to marry the elder one. At least, we all made sure that he would, which comes
to the same thing. She was two and twenty, and he was thirty-three, with pay
and allowances of nearly fourteen hundred rupees a month. So the match, as we
arranged it, was in every way a good one. Saumarez was his name, and summary
was his nature, as a man once said. Having drafted his Resolution, he formed a
Select Committee of One to sit upon it, and resolved to take his time. In our
unpleasant slang, the Copleigh girls "hunted in couples." That is to say, you
could do nothing with one without the other. They were very loving sisters;
but their mutual affection was sometimes inconvenient. Saumarez held the
balance-hair true between them, and none but himself could have said to which
side his heart inclined; though every one guessed. He rode with them a good
deal and danced with them, but he never succeeded in detaching them from each
other for any length of time.
Women said that the two girls kept together through deep mistrust, each
fearing that the other would steal a march on her. But that has nothing to do
with a man. Saumarez was silent for good or bad, and as
@business--likely attentive as he could be, having due regard to his work and
his polo. Beyond doubt both girls were fond of him.
As the hot weather drew nearer, and Saumarez made no sign, women said that you
could see their trouble in the eyes of the girls--that they were looking
strained, anxious, and irritable. Men are quite blind in these matters unless
they have more of the woman than the man in their composition, in which case
it does not matter what they say or think. I maintain it was the hot April
days that took the color out of the Copleigh girls' cheeks. They should have
been sent to the Hills early. No one--man or woman--feels an angel when the
hot weather is approaching. The younger sister grew more cynical--not to say
acid--in her ways; and the winningness of the elder wore thin. There was more
effort in it.
Now the Station wherein all these things happened was, though not a little
one, off the line of rail, and suffered through want of attention. There were
no gardens or bands or amusements worth speaking of, and it was nearly a day's
journey to come into Lahore for a dance. People were grateful for small things
to interest them.
About the beginning of May, and just before the final exodus of Hill-goers,
when the weather was very hot and there were not more than twenty people in
the Station, Saumarez gave a moonlight riding-picnic at an old tomb, six miles
away, near the bed of the river. It was a "Noah's Ark" picnic; and there was
to be the usual arrangement of quarter-mile intervals between each couple, on
account of the dust. Six couples came altogether, including chaperons.
Moonlight picnics are useful just at the very end of the season, before all
the girls go away to the Hills. They lead to understandings, and should be
encouraged by chaperones; especially those whose girls look sweetish in riding
habits. I knew a case once. But that is another story. That picnic was called
the "Great Pop Picnic," because every one knew Saumarez would propose then to
the eldest Miss Copleigh; and, beside his affair, there was another which
might possibly come to happiness.
The social atmosphere was heavily charged and wanted clearing.
We met at the parade-ground at ten: the night was fearfully hot.
The horses sweated even at walking-pace, but anything was better than sitting
still in our own dark houses. When we moved off under the full moon we were
four couples, one triplet, and Mr. Saumarez rode with the Copleigh girls, and
I loitered at the tail of the procession, wondering with whom Saumarez would
ride home. Every one was happy and contented; but we all felt that things were
going to happen. We rode slowly: and it was nearly midnight before we reached
the old tomb, facing the ruined tank, in the decayed gardens where we were
going to eat and drink. I was late in coming up; and before I went into the
garden, I saw that the horizon to the north carried a faint, dun-colored
feather. But no one would have thanked me for spoiling so well-managed an
entertainment as this picnic--and a dust-storm, more or less, does no great
harm.
We gathered by the tank. Some one had brought out a banjo--which is a most
sentimental instrument--and three or four of us sang.
You must not laugh at this. Our amusements in out-of-the-way Stations are very
few indeed. Then we talked in groups or together, lying under the trees, with
the sun-baked roses dropping their petals on our feet, until supper was ready.
It was a beautiful supper, as cold and as iced as you could wish; and we
stayed long over it.
I had felt that the air was growing hotter and hotter; but nobody seemed to
notice it until the moon went out and a burning hot wind began lashing the
orange-trees with a sound like the noise of the sea. Before we knew where we
were, the dust-storm was on us, and everything was roaring, whirling darkness.
The supper-table was blown bodily into the tank. We were afraid of staying
anywhere near the old tomb for fear it might be blown down. So we felt our way
to the orange-trees where the horses were picketed and waited for the storm to
blow over. Then the little light that was left vanished, and you could not see
your hand before your face. The air was heavy with dust and sand from the bed
of the river, that filled boots and pockets and drifted down necks and coated
eyebrows and moustaches. It was one of the worst dust-storms of the year.
We were all huddled together close to the trembling horses, with the thunder
clattering overhead, and the lightning spurting like water from a sluice, all
ways at once. There was no danger, of course, unless the horses broke loose. I
was standing with my head downward and my hands over my mouth, hearing the
trees thrashing each other. I could not see who was next me till the flashes
came.
Then I found that I was packed near Saumarez and the eldest Miss Copleigh,
with my own horse just in front of me. I recognized the eldest Miss Copleigh,
because she had a pagri round her helmet, and the younger had not. All the
electricity in the air had gone into my body and I was quivering and tingling
from head to foot--exactly as a corn shoots and tingles before rain. It was a
grand storm.
The wind seemed to be picking up the earth and pitching it to leeward in great
heaps; and the heat beat up from the ground like the heat of the Day of
Judgment.
The storm lulled slightly after the first half-hour, and I heard a despairing
little voice close to my ear, saying to itself, quietly and softly, as if some
lost soul were flying about with the wind: "O my God!" Then the younger Miss
Copleigh stumbled into my arms, saying: "Where is my horse? Get my horse. I
want to go home. I WANT to go home. Take me home."
I thought that the lightning and the black darkness had frightened her; so I
said there was no danger, but she must wait till the storm blew over. She
answered: "It is not THAT! It is not THAT! I want to go home! O take me away
from here!"
I said that she could not go till the light came; but I felt her brush past me
and go away. It was too dark to see where. Then the whole sky was split open
with one tremendous flash, as if the end of the world were coming, and all the
women shrieked.
Almost directly after this, I felt a man's hand on my shoulder and heard
Saumarez bellowing in my ear. Through the rattling of the trees and howling of
the wind, I did not catch his words at once, but at last I heard him say:
"I've proposed to the wrong one! What shall I do?" Saumarez had no occasion to
make this confidence to me. I was never a friend of his, nor am I now; but I
fancy neither of us were ourselves just then. He was shaking as he stood with
excitement, and I was feeling queer all over with the electricity.
I could not think of anything to say except:--"More fool you for proposing in
a dust-storm." But I did not see how that would improve the mistake.
Then he shouted: "Where's Edith--Edith Copleigh?" Edith was the youngest
sister. I answered out of my astonishment:--"What do you want with HER?" Would
you believe it, for the next two minutes, he and I were shouting at each other
like maniacs--he vowing that it was the youngest sister he had meant to
propose to all along, and I telling him till my throat was hoarse that he must
have made a mistake! I can't account for this except, again, by the fact that
we were neither of us ourselves. Everything seemed to me like a bad dream--
from the stamping of the horses in the darkness to Saumarez telling me the
story of his loving Edith Copleigh since the first. He was still clawing my
shoulder and begging me to tell him where Edith Copleigh was, when another
lull came and brought light with it, and we saw the dust-cloud forming on the
plain in front of us. So we knew the worst was over. The moon was low down,
and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about an hour
before the real one. But the light was very faint, and the dun cloud roared
like a bull. I wondered where Edith Copleigh had gone; and as I was wondering
I saw three things together: First Maud Copleigh's face come smiling out of
the darkness and move towards Saumarez, who was standing by me. I heard the
girl whisper, "George," and slide her arm through the arm that was not clawing
my shoulder, and I saw that look on her face which only comes once or twice in
a lifetime--when a woman is perfectly happy and the air is full of trumpets
and gorgeous-colored fire and the Earth turns into cloud because she loves and
is loved. At the same time, I saw Saumarez's face as he heard Maud Copleigh's
voice, and fifty yards away from the clump of orange-trees I saw a brown
holland habit getting upon a horse.
It must have been my state of over-excitement that made me so quick to meddle
with what did not concern me. Saumarez was moving off to the habit; but I
pushed him back and said:--"Stop here and explain. I'll fetch her back!" and I
ran out to get at my own horse. I had a perfectly unnecessary notion that
everything must be done decently and in order, and that Saumarez's first care
was to wipe the happy look out of Maud Copleigh's face. All the time I was
linking up the curb-chain I wondered how he would do it.
I cantered after Edith Copleigh, thinking to bring her back slowly on some
pretence or another. But she galloped away as soon as she saw me, and I was
forced to ride after her in earnest. She called back over her shoulder--"Go
away! I'm going home. Oh, go away!" two or three times; but my business was to
catch her first, and argue later. The ride just fitted in with the rest of the
evil dream. The ground was very bad, and now and again we rushed through the
whirling, choking "dust-devils" in the skirts of the flying storm. There was a
burning hot wind blowing that brought up a stench of stale brick-kilns with
it; and through the half light and through the dust-devils, across that
desolate plain, flickered the brown holland habit on the gray horse. She
headed for the Station at first. Then she wheeled round and set off for the
river through beds of burnt down jungle-grass, bad even to ride a pig over. In
cold blood I should never have dreamed of going over such a country at night,
but it seemed quite right and natural with the lightning crackling overhead,
and a reek like the smell of the Pit in my nostrils. I rode and shouted, and
she bent forward and lashed her horse, and the aftermath of the dust-storm
came up and caught us both, and drove us downwind like pieces of paper.
I don't know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs and the roar
of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon through the yellow mist
seemed to have gone on for years and years, and I was literally drenched with
sweat from my helmet to my gaiters when the gray stumbled, recovered himself,
and pulled up dead lame. My brute was used up altogether. Edith Copleigh was
in a sad state, plastered with dust, her helmet off, and crying bitterly. "Why
can't you let me alone?" she said. "I only wanted to get away and go home. Oh,
PLEASE let me go!"
"You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has something to
say to you."
It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss Copleigh; and,
though I was playing Providence at the cost of my horse, I could not tell her
in as many words what Saumarez had told me. I thought he could do that better
himself. All her pretence about being tired and wanting to go home broke down,
and she rocked herself to and fro in the saddle as she sobbed, and the hot
wind blew her black hair to leeward. I am not going to repeat what she said,
because she was utterly unstrung.
This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost an
utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her and she was
to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself understood, for she
gathered the gray together and made him hobble somehow, and we set off for the
tomb, while the storm went thundering down to Umballa and a few big drops of
warm rain fell. I found out that she had been standing close to Saumarez when
he proposed to her sister and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an
English girl should. She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we
went along, and babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria.
That was perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in
the place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I,
ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this misguided
world seemed to lie in my hands.
When we returned to the tomb in the deep, dead stillness that followed the
storm, the dawn was just breaking and nobody had gone away. They were waiting
for our return. Saumarez most of all.
His face was white and drawn. As Miss Copleigh and I limped up, he came
forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he kissed
her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and the likeness
was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men and women under the
orange-trees, clapping their hands, as if they were watching a play--at
Saumarez's choice. I never knew anything so un-English in my life.
Lastly, Saumarez said we must all go home or the Station would come out to
look for us, and WOULD I be good enough to ride home with Maud Copleigh?
Nothing would give me greater pleasure, I said.
So, we formed up, six couples in all, and went back two by two; Saumarez
walking at the side of Edith Copleigh, who was riding his horse.
The air was cleared; and little by little, as the sun rose, I felt we were all
dropping back again into ordinary men and women and that the "Great Pop
Picnic" was a thing altogether apart and out of the world--never to happen
again. It had gone with the dust-storm and the tingle in the hot air.
I felt tired and limp, and a good deal ashamed of myself as I went in for a
bath and some sleep.
There is a woman's version of this story, but it will never be written . . . .
unless Maud Copleigh cares to try.
THE RESCUE OF PLUFFLES.
Thus, for a season, they fought it fair--
She and his cousin May--
Tactful, talented, debonnaire,
Decorous foes were they;
But never can battle of man compare
With merciless feminine fray.
--Two and One.
Mrs. Hauksbee was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here is a story to prove
this; and you can believe just as much as ever you please.
Pluffles was a subaltern in the "Unmentionables." He was callow, even for a
subaltern. He was callow all over--like a canary that had not finished
fledging itself. The worst of it was he had three times as much money as was
good for him; Pluffles' Papa being a rich man and Pluffles being the only son.
Pluffles' Mamma adored him. She was only a little less callow than Pluffles
and she believed everything he said.
Pluffles' weakness was not believing what people said. He preferred what he
called "trusting to his own judgment." He had as much judgment as he had seat
or hands; and this preference tumbled him into trouble once or twice. But the
biggest trouble Pluffles ever manufactured came about at Simla--some years
ago, when he was four-and-twenty.
He began by trusting to his own judgment, as usual, and the result was that,
after a time, he was bound hand and foot to Mrs. Reiver's 'rickshaw wheels.
There was nothing good about Mrs. Reiver, unless it was her dress.
She was bad from her hair--which started life on a Brittany's girl's head--to
her boot-heels, which were two and three-eighth inches high. She was not
honestly mischievous like Mrs. Hauksbee; she was wicked in a business-like
way.
There was never any scandal--she had not generous impulses enough for that.
She was the exception which proved the rule that Anglo-Indian ladies are in
every way as nice as their sisters at Home.
She spent her life in proving that rule.
Mrs. Hauksbee and she hated each other fervently. They heard far too much to
clash; but the things they said of each other were startling--not to say
original. Mrs. Hauksbee was honest--honest as her own front teeth--and, but
for her love of mischief, would have been a woman's woman. There was no
honesty about Mrs. Reiver; nothing but selfishness. And at the beginning of
the season, poor little Pluffles fell a prey to her. She laid herself out to
that end, and who was Pluffles, to resist? He went on trusting to his
judgment, and he got judged.
I have seen Hayes argue with a tough horse--I have seen a tonga-driver coerce
a stubborn pony--I have seen a riotous setter broken to gun by a hard keeper--
but the breaking-in of Pluffles of the "Unmentionables" was beyond all these.
He learned to fetch and carry like a dog, and to wait like one, too, for a
word from Mrs. Reiver. He learned to keep appointments which Mrs. Reiver had
no intention of keeping. He learned to take thankfully dances which Mrs.
Reiver had no intention of giving him. He learned to shiver for an hour and a
quarter on the windward side of Elysium while Mrs. Reiver was making up her
mind to come for a ride. He learned to hunt for a 'rickshaw, in a light dress-
suit under a pelting rain, and to walk by the side of that 'rickshaw when he
had found it. He learned what it was to be spoken to like a coolie and ordered
about like a cook. He learned all this and many other things besides. And he
paid for his schooling.
Perhaps, in some hazy way, he fancied that it was fine and impressive, that it
gave him a status among men, and was altogether the thing to do. It was
nobody's business to warn Pluffles that he was unwise. The pace that season
was too good to inquire; and meddling with another man's folly is always
thankless work.
Pluffles' Colonel should have ordered him back to his regiment when he heard
how things were going. But Pluffles had got himself engaged to a girl in
England the last time he went home; and if there was one thing more than
another which the Colonel detested, it was a married subaltern. He chuckled
when he heard of the education of Pluffles, and said it was "good training for
the boy." But it was not good training in the least. It led him into spending
money beyond his means, which were good: above that, the education spoilt an
average boy and made it a tenth-rate man of an objectionable kind. He wandered
into a bad set, and his little bill at Hamilton's was a thing to wonder at.
Then Mrs. Hauksbee rose to the occasion. She played her game alone, knowing
what people would say of her; and she played it for the sake of a girl she had
never seen. Pluffles' fiancee was to come out, under the chaperonage of an
aunt, in October, to be married to Pluffles.
At the beginning of August, Mrs. Hauksbee discovered that it was time to
interfere. A man who rides much knows exactly what a horse is going to do next
before he does it. In the same way, a woman of Mrs. Hauksbee's experience
knows accurately how a boy will behave under certain circumstances--notably
when he is infatuated with one of Mrs. Reiver's stamp. She said that, sooner
or later, little Pluffles would break off that engagement for nothing at all--
simply to gratify Mrs. Reiver, who, in return, would keep him at her feet and
in her service just so long as she found it worth her while.
She said she knew the signs of these things. If she did not, no one else
could.
Then she went forth to capture Pluffles under the guns of the enemy; just as
Mrs. Cusack-Bremmil carried away Bremmil under Mrs. Hauksbee's eyes.
This particular engagement lasted seven weeks--we called it the Seven Weeks'
War--and was fought out inch by inch on both sides. A detailed account would
fill a book, and would be incomplete then.
Any one who knows about these things can fit in the details for himself. It
was a superb fight--there will never be another like it as long as Jakko
stands--and Pluffles was the prize of victory.
People said shameful things about Mrs. Hauksbee. They did not know what she
was playing for. Mrs. Reiver fought, partly because Pluffles was useful to
her, but mainly because she hated Mrs. Hauksbee, and the matter was a trial of
strength between them. No one knows what Pluffles thought. He had not many
ideas at the best of times, and the few he possessed made him conceited. Mrs.
Hauksbee said:--"The boy must be caught; and the only way of catching him is
by treating him well."
So she treated him as a man of the world and of experience so long as the
issue was doubtful. Little by little, Pluffles fell away from his old
allegiance and came over to the enemy, by whom he was made much of. He was
never sent on out-post duty after 'rickshaws any more, nor was he given dances
which never came off, nor were the drains on his purse continued. Mrs.
Hauksbee held him on the snaffle; and after his treatment at Mrs. Reiver's
hands, he appreciated the change.
Mrs. Reiver had broken him of talking about himself, and made him talk about
her own merits. Mrs. Hauksbee acted otherwise, and won his confidence, till he
mentioned his engagement to the girl at Home, speaking of it in a high and
mighty way as a "piece of boyish folly." This was when he was taking tea with
her one afternoon, and discoursing in what he considered a gay and fascinating
style.
Mrs. Hauksbee had seen an earlier generation of his stamp bud and blossom, and
decay into fat Captains and tubby Majors.
At a moderate estimate there were about three and twenty sides to that lady's
character. Some men say more. She began to talk to Pluffles after the manner
of a mother, and as if there had been three hundred years, instead of fifteen,
between them. She spoke with a sort of throaty quaver in her voice which had a
soothing effect, though what she said was anything but soothing. She pointed
out the exceeding folly, not to say meanness, of Pluffles' conduct, and the
smallness of his views. Then he stammered something about "trusting to his own
judgment as a man of the world;" and this paved the way for what she wanted to
say next. It would have withered up Pluffles had it come from any other woman;
but in the soft cooing style in which Mrs. Hauksbee put it, it only made him
feel limp and repentant--as if he had been in some superior kind of church.
Little by little, very softly and pleasantly, she began taking the conceit out
of Pluffles, as you take the ribs out of an umbrella before re-covering it.
She told him what she thought of him and his judgment and his knowledge of the
world; and how his performances had made him ridiculous to other people; and
how it was his intention to make love to herself if she gave him the chance.
Then she said that marriage would be the making of him; and drew a pretty
little picture--all rose and opal--of the Mrs. Pluffles of the future going
through life relying on the "judgment" and "knowledge of the world" of a
husband who had nothing to reproach himself with. How she reconciled these two
statements she alone knew. But they did not strike Pluffles as conflicting.
Hers was a perfect little homily--much better than any clergyman could have
given--and it ended with touching allusions to Pluffles' Mamma and Papa, and
the wisdom of taking his bride Home.
Then she sent Pluffles out for a walk, to think over what she had said.
Pluffles left, blowing his nose very hard and holding himself very straight.
Mrs. Hauksbee laughed.
What Pluffles had intended to do in the matter of the engagement only Mrs.
Reiver knew, and she kept her own counsel to her death. She would have liked
it spoiled as a compliment, I fancy.
Pluffles enjoyed many talks with Mrs. Hauksbee during the next few days. They
were all to the same end, and they helped Pluffles in the path of Virtue.
Mrs. Hauksbee wanted to keep him under her wing to the last.
Therefore she discountenanced his going down to Bombay to get married.
"Goodness only knows what might happen by the way!" she said. "Pluffles is
cursed with the curse of Reuben, and India is no fit place for him!"
In the end, the fiancee arrived with her aunt; and Pluffles, having reduced
his affairs to some sort of order--here again Mrs. Hauksbee helped him--was
married.
Mrs. Hauksbee gave a sigh of relief when both the "I wills" had been said, and
went her way.
Pluffles took her advice about going Home. He left the Service, and is now
raising speckled cattle inside green painted fences somewhere at Home. I
believe he does this very judiciously. He would have come to extreme grief out
here.
For these reasons if any one says anything more than usually nasty about Mrs.
Hauksbee, tell him the story of the Rescue of Pluffles.
CUPID'S ARROWS.
Pit where the buffalo cooled his hide,
By the hot sun emptied, and blistered and dried;
Log in the reh-grass, hidden and alone;
Bund where the earth-rat's mounds are strown;
Cave in the bank where the sly stream steals;
Aloe that stabs at the belly and heels,
Jump if you dare on a steed untried--
Safer it is to go wide--go wide!
Hark, from in front where the best men ride:--
"Pull to the off, boys! Wide! Go wide!"
--The Peora Hunt.
Once upon a time there lived at Simla a very pretty girl, the daughter of a
poor but honest District and Sessions Judge. She was a good girl, but could
not help knowing her power and using it.
Her Mamma was very anxious about her daughter's future, as all good Mammas
should be.
When a man is a Commissioner and a bachelor and has the right of wearing open-
work jam-tart jewels in gold and enamel on his clothes, and of going through a
door before every one except a Member of Council, a Lieutenant-Governor, or a
Viceroy, he is worth marrying. At least, that is what ladies say. There was a
Commissioner in Simla, in those days, who was, and wore, and did, all I have
said. He was a plain man--an ugly man--the ugliest man in Asia, with two
exceptions. His was a face to dream about and try to carve on a pipe-head
afterwards. His name was Saggott--Barr-Saggott--Anthony Barr-Saggott and six
letters to follow.
Departmentally, he was one of the best men the Government of India owned.
Socially, he was like a blandishing gorilla.
When he turned his attentions to Miss Beighton, I believe that Mrs.
Beighton wept with delight at the reward Providence had sent her in her old
age.
Mr. Beighton held his tongue. He was an easy-going man.
Now a Commissioner is very rich. His pay is beyond the dreams of avarice--is
so enormous that he can afford to save and scrape in a way that would almost
discredit a Member of Council. Most Commissioners are mean; but Barr-Saggott
was an exception. He entertained royally; he horsed himself well; he gave
dances; he was a power in the land; and he behaved as such.
Consider that everything I am writing of took place in an almost pre-historic
era in the history of British India. Some folk may remember the years before
lawn-tennis was born when we all played croquet. There were seasons before
that, if you will believe me, when even croquet had not been invented, and
archery--which was revived in England in 1844--was as great a pest as lawn-
tennis is now. People talked learnedly about "holding" and "loosing,"
"steles," "reflexed bows," "56-pound bows," "backed" or "self-yew bows," as we
talk about "rallies," "volleys," "smashes," "returns," and "16-ounce rackets."
Miss Beighton shot divinely over ladies' distance--60 yards, that is--and was
acknowledged the best lady archer in Simla. Men called her "Diana of Tara-
Devi."
Barr-Saggott paid her great attention; and, as I have said, the heart of her
mother was uplifted in consequence. Kitty Beighton took matters more calmly.
It was pleasant to be singled out by a Commissioner with letters after his
name, and to fill the hearts of other girls with bad feelings. But there was
no denying the fact that Barr-Saggott was phenomenally ugly; and all his
attempts to adorn himself only made him more grotesque. He was not christened
"The Langur"--which means gray ape--for nothing. It was pleasant, Kitty
thought, to have him at her feet, but it was better to escape from him and
ride with the graceless Cubbon--the man in a Dragoon Regiment at Umballa--the
boy with a handsome face, and no prospects. Kitty liked Cubbon more than a
little. He never pretended for a moment the he was anything less than head
over heels in love with her; for he was an honest boy. So Kitty fled, now and
again, from the stately wooings of Barr-Saggott to the company of young
Cubbon, and was scolded by her Mamma in consequence. "But, Mother," she said,
"Mr. Saggott is such--such a--is so FEARFULLY ugly, you know!"
"My dear," said Mrs. Beighton, piously, "we cannot be other than an all-ruling
Providence has made us. Besides, you will take precedence of your own Mother,
you know! Think of that and be reasonable."
Then Kitty put up her little chin and said irreverent things about precedence,
and Commissioners, and matrimony. Mr. Beighton rubbed the top of his head; for
he was an easy-going man.
Late in the season, when he judged that the time was ripe, Barr-Saggott
developed a plan which did great credit to his administrative powers. He
arranged an archery tournament for ladies, with a most sumptuous diamond-
studded bracelet as prize.
He drew up his terms skilfully, and every one saw that the bracelet was a gift
to Miss Beighton; the acceptance carrying with it the hand and the heart of
Commissioner Barr-Saggott. The terms were a St. Leonard's Round--thirty-six
shots at sixty yards--under the rules of the Simla Toxophilite Society.
All Simla was invited. There were beautifully arranged tea-tables under the
deodars at Annandale, where the Grand Stand is now; and, alone in its glory,
winking in the sun, sat the diamond bracelet in a blue velvet case. Miss
Beighton was anxious--almost too anxious to compete. On the appointed
afternoon, all Simla rode down to Annandale to witness the Judgment of Paris
turned upside down.
Kitty rode with young Cubbon, and it was easy to see that the boy was troubled
in his mind. He must be held innocent of everything that followed. Kitty was
pale and nervous, and looked long at the bracelet. Barr-Saggott was gorgeously
dressed, even more nervous than Kitty, and more hideous than ever.
Mrs. Beighton smiled condescendingly, as befitted the mother of a potential
Commissioneress, and the shooting began; all the world standing in a
semicircle as the ladies came out one after the other.
Nothing is so tedious as an archery competition. They shot, and they shot, and
they kept on shooting, till the sun left the valley, and little breezes got up
in the deodars, and people waited for Miss Beighton to shoot and win. Cubbon
was at one horn of the semicircle round the shooters, and Barr-Saggott at the
other. Miss Beighton was last on the list. The scoring had been weak, and the
bracelet, PLUS Commissioner Barr-Saggott, was hers to a certainty.
The Commissioner strung her bow with his own sacred hands. She stepped
forward, looked at the bracelet, and her first arrow went true to a hair--full
into the heart of the "gold"--counting nine points.
Young Cubbon on the left turned white, and his Devil prompted Barr-Saggott to
smile. Now horses used to shy when Barr-Saggott smiled.
Kitty saw that smile. She looked to her left-front, gave an almost
imperceptible nod to Cubbon, and went on shooting.
I wish I could describe the scene that followed. It was out of the ordinary
and most improper. Miss Kitty fitted her arrows with immense deliberation, so
that every one might see what she was doing. She was a perfect shot; and her
46-pound bow suited her to a nicety. She pinned the wooden legs of the target
with great care four successive times. She pinned the wooden top of the target
once, and all the ladies looked at each other. Then she began some fancy
shooting at the white, which, if you hit it, counts exactly one point. She put
five arrows into the white. It was wonderful archery; but, seeing that her
business was to make "golds" and win the bracelet, Barr-Saggott turned a
delicate green like young water-grass. Next, she shot over the target twice,
then wide to the left twice--always with the same deliberation--while a chilly
hush fell over the company, and Mrs. Beighton took out her handkerchief. Then
Kitty shot at the ground in front of the target, and split several arrows.
Then she made a red--or seven points--just to show what she could do if she
liked, and finished up her amazing performance with some more fancy shooting
at the target-supports. Here is her score as it was picked off:--
Gold. Red. Blue. Black. White. Total Hits. Total Score Miss Beighton
1 1 0 0 5 7 21
Barr-Saggott looked as if the last few arrowheads had been driven into his
legs instead of the target's, and the deep stillness was broken by a little
snubby, mottled, half-grown girl saying in a shrill voice of triumph: "Then
I'VE won!"
Mrs. Beighton did her best to bear up; but she wept in the presence of the
people. No training could help her through such a disappointment. Kitty
unstrung her bow with a vicious jerk, and went back to her place, while Barr-
Saggott was trying to pretend that he enjoyed snapping the bracelet on the
snubby girl's raw, red wrist. It was an awkward scene--most awkward. Every one
tried to depart in a body and leave Kitty to the mercy of her Mamma.
But Cubbon took her away instead, and--the rest isn't worth printing.
HIS CHANCE IN LIFE.
Then a pile of heads be laid--
Thirty thousand heaped on high--
All to please the Kafir maid,
Where the Oxus ripples by.
Grimly spake Atulla Khan:--
"Love hath made this thing a Man."
--Oatta's Story.
If you go straight away from Levees and Government House Lists, past Trades'
Balls--far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable
life--you cross, in time, the Border line where the last drop of White blood
ends and the full tide of Black sets in. It would be easier to talk to a new-
made Duchess on the spur of the moment than to the Borderline folk without
violating some of their conventions or hurting their feelings. The Black and
the White mix very quaintly in their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts
of fierce, childish pride--which is Pride of Race run crooked--and sometimes
the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and
strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this people--
understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the man who
imitated Byron, sprung--will turn out a writer or a poet; and then we shall
know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them
cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference.
Miss Vezzis came from across the Borderline to look after some children who
belonged to a lady until a regularly ordained nurse could come out. The lady
said Miss Vezzis was a bad, dirty nurse and inattentive. It never struck her
that Miss Vezzis had her own life to lead and her own affairs to worry over,
and that these affairs were the most important things in the world to Miss
Vezzis.
Very few mistresses admit this sort of reasoning. Miss Vezzis was as black as
a boot, and to our standard of taste, hideously ugly.
She wore cotton-print gowns and bulged shoes; and when she lost her temper
with the children, she abused them in the language of the Borderline--which is
part English, part Portuguese, and part Native. She was not attractive; but
she had her pride, and she preferred being called "Miss Vezzis."
Every Sunday she dressed herself wonderfully and went to see her Mamma, who
lived, for the most part, on an old cane chair in a greasy tussur-silk
dressing-gown and a big rabbit-warren of a house full of Vezzises, Pereiras,
Ribieras, Lisboas and Gansalveses, and a floating population of loafers;
besides fragments of the day's bazar, garlic, stale incense, clothes thrown on
the floor, petticoats hung on strings for screens, old bottles, pewter
crucifixes, dried immortelles, pariah puppies, plaster images of the Virgin,
and hats without crowns. Miss Vezzis drew twenty rupees a month for acting as
nurse, and she squabbled weekly with her Mamma as to the percentage to be
given towards housekeeping.
When the quarrel was over, Michele D'Cruze used to shamble across the low mud
wall of the compound and make love to Miss Vezzis after the fashion of the
Borderline, which is hedged about with much ceremony. Michele was a poor,
sickly weed and very black; but he had his pride. He would not be seen smoking
a huqa for anything; and he looked down on natives as only a man with seven-
eighths native blood in his veins can. The Vezzis Family had their pride too.
They traced their descent from a mythical plate-layer who had worked on the
Sone Bridge when railways were new in India, and they valued their English
origin. Michele was a Telegraph Signaller on Rs. 35 a month. The fact that he
was in Government employ made Mrs. Vezzis lenient to the shortcomings of his
ancestors.
There was a compromising legend--Dom Anna the tailor brought it from Poonani--
that a black Jew of Cochin had once married into the D'Cruze family; while it
was an open secret that an uncle of Mrs. D'Cruze was at that very time doing
menial work, connected with cooking, for a Club in Southern India! He sent Mrs
D'Cruze seven rupees eight annas a month; but she felt the disgrace to the
family very keenly all the same.
However, in the course of a few Sundays, Mrs. Vezzis brought herself to
overlook these blemishes and gave her consent to the marriage of her daughter
with Michele, on condition that Michele should have at least fifty rupees a
month to start married life upon. This wonderful prudence must have been a
lingering touch of the mythical plate-layer's Yorkshire blood; for across the
Borderline people take a pride in marrying when they please--not when they
can.
Having regard to his departmental prospects, Miss Vezzis might as well have
asked Michele to go away and come back with the Moon in his pocket. But
Michele was deeply in love with Miss Vezzis, and that helped him to endure. He
accompanied Miss Vezzis to Mass one Sunday, and after Mass, walking home
through the hot stale dust with her hand in his, he swore by several Saints,
whose names would not interest you, never to forget Miss Vezzis; and she swore
by her Honor and the Saints--the oath runs rather curiously; "In nomine
Sanctissimae--" (whatever the name of the she-Saint is) and so forth, ending
with a kiss on the forehead, a kiss on the left cheek, and a kiss on the
mouth--never to forget Michele.
Next week Michele was transferred, and Miss Vezzis dropped tears upon the
window-sash of the "Intermediate" compartment as he left the Station.
If you look at the telegraph-map of India you will see a long line skirting
the coast from Backergunge to Madras. Michele was ordered to Tibasu, a little
Sub-office one-third down this line, to send messages on from Berhampur to
Chicacola, and to think of Miss Vezzis and his chances of getting fifty rupees
a month out of office hours. He had the noise of the Bay of Bengal and a
Bengali Babu for company; nothing more. He sent foolish letters, with crosses
tucked inside the flaps of the envelopes, to Miss Vezzis.
When he had been at Tibasu for nearly three weeks his chance came.
Never forget that unless the outward and visible signs of Our Authority are
always before a native he is as incapable as a child of understanding what
authority means, or where is the danger of disobeying it. Tibasu was a
forgotten little place with a few Orissa Mohamedans in it. These, hearing
nothing of the Collector-Sahib for some time, and heartily despising the Hindu
Sub-Judge, arranged to start a little Mohurrum riot of their own. But the
Hindus turned out and broke their heads; when, finding lawlessness pleasant,
Hindus and Mahomedans together raised an aimless sort of Donnybrook just to
see how far they could go. They looted each other's shops, and paid off
private grudges in the regular way. It was a nasty little riot, but not worth
putting in the newspapers.
Michele was working in his office when he heard the sound that a man never
forgets all his life--the "ah-yah" of an angry crowd.
[When that sound drops about three tones, and changes to a thick, droning ut,
the man who hears it had better go away if he is alone.] The Native Police
Inspector ran in and told Michele that the town was in an uproar and coming to
wreck the Telegraph Office.
The Babu put on his cap and quietly dropped out of the window; while the
Police Inspector, afraid, but obeying the old race-instinct which recognizes a
drop of White blood as far as it can be diluted, said:--"What orders does the
Sahib give?"
The "Sahib" decided Michele. Though horribly frightened, he felt that, for the
hour, he, the man with the Cochin Jew and the menial uncle in his pedigree,
was the only representative of English authority in the place. Then he thought
of Miss Vezzis and the fifty rupees, and took the situation on himself. There
were seven native policemen in Tibasu, and four crazy smooth-bore muskets
among them. All the men were gray with fear, but not beyond leading. Michele
dropped the key of the telegraph instrument, and went out, at the head of his
army, to meet the mob. As the shouting crew came round a corner of the road,
he dropped and fired; the men behind him loosing instinctively at the same
time.
The whole crowd--curs to the backbone--yelled and ran; leaving one man dead,
and another dying in the road. Michele was sweating with fear, but he kept his
weakness under, and went down into the town, past the house where the Sub-
Judge had barricaded himself. The streets were empty. Tibasu was more
frightened than Michele, for the mob had been taken at the right time.
Michele returned to the Telegraph-Office, and sent a message to Chicacola
asking for help. Before an answer came, he received a deputation of the elders
of Tibasu, telling him that the Sub-Judge said his actions generally were
"unconstitional," and trying to bully him. But the heart of Michele D'Cruze
was big and white in his breast, because of his love for Miss Vezzis, the
nurse-girl, and because he had tasted for the first time Responsibility and
Success. Those two make an intoxicating drink, and have ruined more men than
ever has Whiskey. Michele answered that the Sub-Judge might say what he
pleased, but, until the Assistant Collector came, the Telegraph Signaller was
the Government of India in Tibasu, and the elders of the town would be held
accountable for further rioting. Then they bowed their heads and said: "Show
mercy!" or words to that effect, and went back in great fear; each accusing
the other of having begun the rioting.
Early in the dawn, after a night's patrol with his seven policemen, Michele
went down the road, musket in hand, to meet the Assistant Collector, who had
ridden in to quell Tibasu. But, in the presence of this young Englishman,
Michele felt himself slipping back more and more into the native, and the tale
of the Tibasu Riots ended, with the strain on the teller, in an hysterical
outburst of tears, bred by sorrow that he had killed a man, shame that he
could not feel as uplifted as he had felt through the night, and childish
anger that his tongue could not do justice to his great deeds. It was the
White drop in Michele's veins dying out, though he did not know it.
But the Englishman understood; and, after he had schooled those men of Tibasu,
and had conferred with the Sub-Judge till that excellent official turned
green, he found time to draught an official letter describing the conduct of
Michele. Which letter filtered through the Proper Channels, and ended in the
transfer of Michele up-country once more, on the Imperial salary of sixty-six
rupees a month.
So he and Miss Vezzis were married with great state and ancientry; and now
there are several little D'Cruzes sprawling about the verandahs of the Central
Telegraph Office.
But, if the whole revenue of the Department he serves were to be his reward
Michele could never, never repeat what he did at Tibasu for the sake of Miss
Vezzis the nurse-girl.
Which proves that, when a man does good work out of all proportion to his pay,
in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the virtue.
The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke.
WATCHES OF THE NIGHT.
What is in the Brahmin's books that is in the Brahmin's heart.
Neither you nor I knew there was so much evil in the world.
--Hindu Proverb.
This began in a practical joke; but it has gone far enough now, and is getting
serious.
Platte, the Subaltern, being poor, had a Waterbury watch and a plain leather
guard.
The Colonel had a Waterbury watch also, and for guard, the lip-strap of a
curb-chain. Lip-straps make the best watch guards.
They are strong and short. Between a lip-strap and an ordinary leather guard
there is no great difference; between one Waterbury watch and another there is
none at all. Every one in the station knew the Colonel's lip-strap. He was not
a horsey man, but he liked people to believe he had been one once; and he wove
fantastic stories of the hunting-bridle to which this particular lip-strap had
belonged. Otherwise he was painfully religious.
Platte and the Colonel were dressing at the Club--both late for their
engagements, and both in a hurry. That was Kismet. The two watches were on a
shelf below the looking-glass--guards hanging down. That was carelessness.
Platte changed first, snatched a watch, looked in the glass, settled his tie,
and ran. Forty seconds later, the Colonel did exactly the same thing; each man
taking the other's watch.
You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply suspicious. They
seem--for purely religious purposes, of course--to know more about iniquity
than the Unregenerate. Perhaps they were specially bad before they became
converted! At any rate, in the imputation of things evil, and in putting the
worst construction on things innocent, a certain type of good people may be
trusted to surpass all others. The Colonel and his Wife were of that type. But
the Colonel's Wife was the worst. She manufactured the Station scandal, and--
TALKED TO HER AYAH! Nothing more need be said. The Colonel's Wife broke up the
Laplaces's home. The Colonel's Wife stopped the Ferris-Haughtrey engagement.
The Colonel's Wife induced young Buxton to keep his wife down in the Plains
through the first year of the marriage. Whereby little Mrs.
Buxton died, and the baby with her. These things will be remembered against
the Colonel's Wife so long as there is a regiment in the country.
But to come back to the Colonel and Platte. They went their several ways from
the dressing-room. The Colonel dined with two Chaplains, while Platte went to
a bachelor-party, and whist to follow.
Mark how things happen! If Platte's sais had put the new saddle-pad on the
mare, the butts of the terrets would not have worked through the worn leather,
and the old pad into the mare's withers, when she was coming home at two
o'clock in the morning. She would not have reared, bolted, fallen into a
ditch, upset the cart, and sent Platte flying over an aloe-hedge on to Mrs.
Larkyn's well-kept lawn; and this tale would never have been written. But the
mare did all these things, and while Platte was rolling over and over on the
turf, like a shot rabbit, the watch and guard flew from his waistcoat--as an
Infantry Major's sword hops out of the scabbard when they are firing a feu de
joie--and rolled and rolled in the moonlight, till it stopped under a window.
Platte stuffed his handkerchief under the pad, put the cart straight, and went
home.
Mark again how Kismet works! This would not happen once in a hundred years.
Towards the end of his dinner with the two Chaplains, the Colonel let out his
waistcoat and leaned over the table to look at some Mission Reports. The bar
of the watch-guard worked through the buttonhole, and the watch--Platte's
watch--slid quietly on to the carpet. Where the bearer found it next morning
and kept it.
Then the Colonel went home to the wife of his bosom; but the driver of the
carriage was drunk and lost his way. So the Colonel returned at an unseemly
hour and his excuses were not accepted. If the Colonel's Wife had been an
ordinary "vessel of wrath appointed for destruction," she would have known
that when a man stays away on purpose, his excuse is always sound and
original. The very baldness of the Colonel's explanation proved its truth.
See once more the workings of Kismet! The Colonel's watch which came with
Platte hurriedly on to Mrs. Larkyn's lawn, chose to stop just under Mrs.
Larkyn's window, where she saw it early in the morning, recognized it, and
picked it up. She had heard the crash of Platte's cart at two o'clock that
morning, and his voice calling the mare names. She knew Platte and liked him.
That day she showed him the watch and heard his story. He put his head on one
side, winked and said:--"How disgusting! Shocking old man! with his religious
training, too! I should send the watch to the Colonel's Wife and ask for
explanations."
Mrs. Larkyn thought for a minute of the Laplaces--whom she had known when
Laplace and his wife believed in each other--and answered:--"I will send it. I
think it will do her good. But remember, we must NEVER tell her the truth."
Platte guessed that his own watch was in the Colonel's possession, and thought
that the return of the lip-strapped Waterbury with a soothing note from Mrs.
Larkyn, would merely create a small trouble for a few minutes. Mrs. Larkyn
knew better. She knew that any poison dropped would find good holding-ground
in the heart of the Colonel's Wife.
The packet, and a note containing a few remarks on the Colonel's calling-
hours, were sent over to the Colonel's Wife, who wept in her own room and took
counsel with herself.
If there was one woman under Heaven whom the Colonel's Wife hated with holy
fervor, it was Mrs. Larkyn. Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous lady, and called the
Colonel's Wife "old cat." The Colonel's Wife said that somebody in Revelations
was remarkably like Mrs. Larkyn.
She mentioned other Scripture people as well. From the Old Testament. [But the
Colonel's Wife was the only person who cared or dared to say anything against
Mrs. Larkyn. Every one else accepted her as an amusing, honest little body.]
Wherefore, to believe that her husband had been shedding watches under that
"Thing's" window at ungodly hours, coupled with the fact of his late arrival
on the previous night, was . . . . .
At this point she rose up and sought her husband. He denied everything except
the ownership of the watch. She besought him, for his Soul's sake, to speak
the truth. He denied afresh, with two bad words. Then a stony silence held the
Colonel's Wife, while a man could draw his breath five times.
The speech that followed is no affair of mine or yours. It was made up of
wifely and womanly jealousy; knowledge of old age and sunken cheeks; deep
mistrust born of the text that says even little babies' hearts are as bad as
they make them; rancorous hatred of Mrs. Larkyn, and the tenets of the creed
of the Colonel's Wife's upbringing.
Over and above all, was the damning lip-strapped Waterbury, ticking away in
the palm of her shaking, withered hand. At that hour, I think, the Colonel's
Wife realized a little of the restless suspicions she had injected into old
Laplace's mind, a little of poor Miss Haughtrey's misery, and some of the
canker that ate into Buxton's heart as he watched his wife dying before his
eyes. The Colonel stammered and tried to explain. Then he remembered that his
watch had disappeared; and the mystery grew greater. The Colonel's Wife talked
and prayed by turns till she was tired, and went away to devise means for
"chastening the stubborn heart of her husband." Which translated, means, in
our slang, "tail-twisting."
You see, being deeply impressed with the doctrine of Original Sin, she could
not believe in the face of appearances. She knew too much, and jumped to the
wildest conclusions.
But it was good for her. It spoilt her life, as she had spoilt the life of the
Laplaces. She had lost her faith in the Colonel, and--here the creed suspicion
came in--he might, she argued, have erred many times, before a merciful
Providence, at the hands of so unworthy an instrument as Mrs. Larkyn, had
established his guilt.
He was a bad, wicked, gray-haired profligate. This may sound too sudden a
revulsion for a long-wedded wife; but it is a venerable fact that, if a man or
woman makes a practice of, and takes a delight in, believing and spreading
evil of people indifferent to him or her, he or she will end in believing evil
of folk very near and dear. You may think, also, that the mere incident of the
watch was too small and trivial to raise this misunderstanding. It is another
aged fact that, in life as well as racing, all the worst accidents happen at
little ditches and cut-down fences. In the same way, you sometimes see a woman
who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing
herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. But that is another
story.
Her belief only made the Colonel's Wife more wretched, because it insisted so
strongly on the villainy of men. Remembering what she had done, it was
pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-farthing attempts she made to
hide it from the Station. But the Station knew and laughed heartlessly; for
they had heard the story of the watch, with much dramatic gesture, from Mrs.
Larkyn's lips.
Once or twice Platte said to Mrs. Larkyn, seeing that the Colonel had not
cleared himself:--"This thing has gone far enough. I move we tell the
Colonel's Wife how it happened." Mrs. Larkyn shut her lips and shook her head,
and vowed that the Colonel's Wife must bear her punishment as best she could.
Now Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous woman, in whom none would have suspected deep
hate. So Platte took no action, and came to believe gradually, from the
Colonel's silence, that the Colonel must have "run off the line" somewhere
that night, and, therefore, preferred to stand sentence on the lesser count of
rambling into other people's compounds out of calling hours. Platte forgot
about the watch business after a while, and moved down-country with his
regiment. Mrs. Larkyn went home when her husband's tour of Indian service
expired. She never forgot.
But Platte was quite right when he said that the joke had gone too far. The
mistrust and the tragedy of it--which we outsiders cannot see and do not
believe in--are killing the Colonel's Wife, and are making the Colonel
wretched. If either of them read this story, they can depend upon its being a
fairly true account of the case, and can "kiss and make friends."
Shakespeare alludes to the pleasure of watching an Engineer being shelled by
his own Battery. Now this shows that poets should not write about what they do
not understand. Any one could have told him that Sappers and Gunners are
perfectly different branches of the Service. But, if you correct the sentence,
and substitute Gunner for Sapper, the moral comes just the same.
THE OTHER MAN.
When the earth was sick and the skies were gray,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.
--Old Ballad.
Far back in the "seventies," before they had built any Public Offices at
Simla, and the broad road round Jakko lived in a pigeon-hole in the P. W. D.
hovels, her parents made Miss Gaurey marry Colonel Schreiderling. He could not
have been MUCH more than thirty-five years her senior; and, as he lived on two
hundred rupees a month and had money of his own, he was well off. He belonged
to good people, and suffered in the cold weather from lung complaints. In the
hot weather he dangled on the brink of heat-apoplexy; but it never quite
killed him.
Understand, I do not blame Schreiderling. He was a good husband according to
his lights, and his temper only failed him when he was being nursed. Which was
some seventeen days in each month. He was almost generous to his wife about
money matters, and that, for him, was a concession. Still Mrs. Schreiderling
was not happy. They married her when she was this side of twenty and had given
all her poor little heart to another man. I have forgotten his name, but we
will call him the Other Man. He had no money and no prospects.
He was not even good-looking; and I think he was in the Commissariat or
Transport. But, in spite of all these things, she loved him very madly; and
there was some sort of an engagement between the two when Schreiderling
appeared and told Mrs. Gaurey that he wished to marry her daughter. Then the
other engagement was broken off--washed away by Mrs. Gaurey's tears, for that
lady governed her house by weeping over disobedience to her authority and the
lack of reverence she received in her old age. The daughter did not take after
her mother. She never cried. Not even at the wedding.
The Other Man bore his loss quietly, and was transferred to as bad a station
as he could find. Perhaps the climate consoled him. He suffered from
intermittent fever, and that may have distracted him from his other trouble.
He was weak about the heart also. Both ways. One of the valves was affected,
and the fever made it worse.
This showed itself later on.
Then many months passed, and Mrs. Schreiderling took to being ill.
She did not pine away like people in story books, but she seemed to pick up
every form of illness that went about a station, from simple fever upwards.
She was never more than ordinarily pretty at the best of times; and the
illness made her ugly. Schreiderling said so. He prided himself on speaking
his mind.
When she ceased being pretty, he left her to her own devices, and went back to
the lairs of his bachelordom. She used to trot up and down Simla Mall in a
forlorn sort of way, with a gray Terai hat well on the back of her head, and a
shocking bad saddle under her.
Schreiderling's generosity stopped at the horse. He said that any saddle would
do for a woman as nervous as Mrs. Schreiderling. She never was asked to dance,
because she did not dance well; and she was so dull and uninteresting, that
her box very seldom had any cards in it. Schreiderling said that if he had
known that she was going to be such a scare-crow after her marriage, he would
never have married her. He always prided himself on speaking his mind, did
Schreiderling!
He left her at Simla one August, and went down to his regiment.
Then she revived a little, but she never recovered her looks. I found out at
the Club that the Other Man is coming up sick--very sick--on an off chance of
recovery. The fever and the heart-valves had nearly killed him. She knew that,
too, and she knew--what I had no interest in knowing--when he was coming up. I
suppose he wrote to tell her. They had not seen each other since a month
before the wedding. And here comes the unpleasant part of the story.
A late call kept me down at the Dovedell Hotel till dusk one evening. Mrs.
Schreidlerling had been flitting up and down the Mall all the afternoon in the
rain. Coming up along the Cart-road, a tonga passed me, and my pony, tired
with standing so long, set off at a canter. Just by the road down to the Tonga
Office Mrs. Schreiderling, dripping from head to foot, was waiting for the
tonga. I turned up-hill, as the tonga was no affair of mine; and just then she
began to shriek. I went back at once and saw, under the Tonga Office lamps,
Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling in the wet road by the back seat of the newly-
arrived tonga, screaming hideously.
Then she fell face down in the dirt as I came up.
Sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning-
stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the Other Man--
dead. The sixty-mile up-hill jolt had been too much for his valve, I suppose.
The tonga-driver said:--"The Sahib died two stages out of Solon. Therefore, I
tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out by the way, and so came to
Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? IT," pointing to the Other Man,
"should have given one rupee."
The Other Man sat with a grin on his face, as if he enjoyed the joke of his
arrival; and Mrs. Schreiderling, in the mud, began to groan. There was no one
except us four in the office and it was raining heavily. The first thing was
to take Mrs. Schreiderling home, and the second was to prevent her name from
being mixed up with the affair. The tonga-driver received five rupees to find
a bazar 'rickshaw for Mrs. Schreiderling. He was to tell the tonga Babu
afterwards of the Other Man, and the Babu was to make such arrangements as
seemed best.
Mrs. Schreiderling was carried into the shed out of the rain, and for three-
quarters of an hour we two waited for the 'rickshaw. The Other Man was left
exactly as he had arrived. Mrs. Schreiderling would do everything but cry,
which might have helped her. She tried to scream as soon as her senses came
back, and then she began praying for the Other Man's soul. Had she not been as
honest as the day, she would have prayed for her own soul too. I waited to
hear her do this, but she did not. Then I tried to get some of the mud off her
habit. Lastly, the 'rickshaw came, and I got her away--partly by force. It was
a terrible business from beginning to end; but most of all when the 'rickshaw
had to squeeze between the wall and the tonga, and she saw by the lamp-light
that thin, yellow hand grasping the awning-stanchion.
She was taken home just as every one was going to a dance at Viceregal Lodge--
"Peterhoff" it was then--and the doctor found that she had fallen from her
horse, that I had picked her up at the back of Jakko, and really deserved
great credit for the prompt manner in which I had secured medical aid. She did
not die--men of Schreiderling's stamp marry women who don't die easily. They
live and grow ugly.
She never told of her one meeting, since her marriage, with the Other Man;
and, when the chill and cough following the exposure of that evening, allowed
her abroad, she never by word or sign alluded to having met me by the Tonga
Office. Perhaps she never knew.
She used to trot up and down the Mall, on that shocking bad saddle, looking as
if she expected to meet some one round the corner every minute. Two years
afterward, she went Home, and died--at Bournemouth, I think.
Schreiderling, when he grew maudlin at Mess, used to talk about "my poor dear
wife." He always set great store on speaking his mind, did Schreiderling!
CONSEQUENCES.
Rosicrucian subtleties
In the Orient had rise;
Ye may find their teachers still
Under Jacatala's Hill.
Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus,
Read what Flood the Seeker tells us
Of the Dominant that runs
Through the cycles of the Suns--
Read my story last and see
Luna at her apogee.
There are yearly appointments, and two-yearly appointments, and five-yearly
appointments at Simla, and there are, or used to be, permanent appointments,
whereon you stayed up for the term of your natural life and secured red cheeks
and a nice income. Of course, you could descend in the cold weather; for Simla
is rather dull then.
Tarrion came from goodness knows where--all away and away in some forsaken
part of Central India, where they call Pachmari a "Sanitarium," and drive
behind trotting bullocks, I believe. He belonged to a regiment; but what he
really wanted to do was to escape from his regiment and live in Simla forever
and ever. He had no preference for anything in particular, beyond a good horse
and a nice partner. He thought he could do everything well; which is a
beautiful belief when you hold it with all your heart. He was clever in many
ways, and good to look at, and always made people round him comfortable--even
in Central India.
So he went up to Simla, and, because he was clever and amusing, he gravitated
naturally to Mrs. Hauksbee, who could forgive everything but stupidity. Once
he did her great service by changing the date on an invitation-card for a big
dance which Mrs. Hauksbee wished to attend, but couldn't because she had
quarrelled with the A.-D.-C., who took care, being a mean man, to invite her
to a small dance on the 6th instead of the big Ball of the 26th. It was a very
clever piece of forgery; and when Mrs. Hauksbee showed the A.-D.-C. her
invitation-card, and chaffed him mildly for not better managing his vendettas,
he really thought he had made a mistake; and--which was wise--realized that it
was no use to fight with Mrs. Hauksbee. She was grateful to Tarrion and asked
what she could do for him. He said simply: "I'm a Freelance up here on leave,
and on the lookout for what I can loot. I haven't a square inch of interest in
all Simla. My name isn't known to any man with an appointment in his gift, and
I want an appointment--a good, sound, pukka one. I believe you can do anything
you turn yourself to do. Will you help me?" Mrs. Hauksbee thought for a
minute, and passed the last of her riding-whip through her lips, as was her
custom when thinking.
Then her eyes sparkled, and she said:--"I will;" and she shook hands on it.
Tarrion, having perfect confidence in this great woman, took no further
thought of the business at all. Except to wonder what sort of an appointment
he would win.
Mrs. Hauksbee began calculating the prices of all the Heads of Departments and
Members of Council she knew, and the more she thought the more she laughed,
because her heart was in the game and it amused her. Then she took a Civil
List and ran over a few of the appointments. There are some beautiful
appointments in the Civil List. Eventually, she decided that, though Tarrion
was too good for the Political Department, she had better begin by trying to
get him in there. What were her own plans to this end, does not matter in the
least, for Luck or Fate played into her hands, and she had nothing to do but
to watch the course of events and take the credit of them.
All Viceroys, when they first come out, pass through the "Diplomatic Secrecy"
craze. It wears off in time; but they all catch it in the beginning, because
they are new to the country.
The particular Viceroy who was suffering from the complaint just then--this
was a long time ago, before Lord Dufferin ever came from Canada, or Lord Ripon
from the bosom of the English Church--had it very badly; and the result was
that men who were new to keeping official secrets went about looking unhappy;
and the Viceroy plumed himself on the way in which he had instilled notions of
reticence into his Staff.
Now, the Supreme Government have a careless custom of committing what they do
to printed papers. These papers deal with all sorts of things--from the
payment of Rs. 200 to a "secret service" native, up to rebukes administered to
Vakils and Motamids of Native States, and rather brusque letters to Native
Princes, telling them to put their houses in order, to refrain from kidnapping
women, or filling offenders with pounded red pepper, and eccentricities of
that kind. Of course, these things could never be made public, because Native
Princes never err officially, and their States are, officially, as well
administered as Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer
people are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint
reading sometimes.
When the Supreme Government is at Simla, these papers are prepared there, and
go round to the people who ought to see them in office-boxes or by post. The
principle of secrecy was to that Viceroy quite as important as the practice,
and he held that a benevolent despotism like Ours should never allow even
little things, such as appointments of subordinate clerks, to leak out till
the proper time. He was always remarkable for his principles.
There was a very important batch of papers in preparation at that time. It had
to travel from one end of Simla to the other by hand.
It was not put into an official envelope, but a large, square, pale-pink one;
the matter being in MS. on soft crinkly paper. It was addressed to "The Head
Clerk, etc., etc." Now, between "The Head Clerk, etc., etc.," and "Mrs.
Hauksbee" and a flourish, is no very great difference if the address be
written in a very bad hand, as this was. The chaprassi who took the envelope
was not more of an idiot than most chaprassis. He merely forgot where this
most unofficial cover was to be delivered, and so asked the first Englishman
he met, who happened to be a man riding down to Annandale in a great hurry.
The Englishman hardly looked, said: "Hauksbee Sahib ki Mem," and went on. So
did the chaprassi, because that letter was the last in stock and he wanted to
get his work over. There was no book to sign; he thrust the letter into Mrs.
Hauksbee's bearer's hands and went off to smoke with a friend.
Mrs. Hauksbee was expecting some cut-out pattern things in flimsy paper from a
friend. As soon as she got the big square packet, therefore, she said, "Oh,
the DEAR creature!" and tore it open with a paper-knife, and all the MS.
enclosures tumbled out on the floor.
Mrs. Hauksbee began reading. I have said the batch was rather important. That
is quite enough for you to know. It referred to some correspondence, two
measures, a peremptory order to a native chief and two dozen other things.
Mrs. Hauksbee gasped as she read, for the first glimpse of the naked machinery
of the Great Indian Government, stripped of its casings, and lacquer, and
paint, and guard-rails, impresses even the most stupid man. And Mrs. Hauksbee
was a clever woman. She was a little afraid at first, and felt as if she had
laid hold of a lightning-flash by the tail, and did not quite know what to do
with it. There were remarks and initials at the side of the papers; and some
of the remarks were rather more severe than the papers. The initials belonged
to men who are all dead or gone now; but they were great in their day.
Mrs. Hauksbee read on and thought calmly as she read. Then the value of her
trove struck her, and she cast about for the best method of using it. Then
Tarrion dropped in, and they read through all the papers together, and
Tarrion, not knowing how she had come by them, vowed that Mrs. Hauksbee was
the greatest woman on earth.
Which I believe was true, or nearly so.
"The honest course is always the best," said Tarrion after an hour and a half
of study and conversation. "All things considered, the Intelligence Branch is
about my form. Either that or the Foreign Office. I go to lay siege to the
High Gods in their Temples."
He did not seek a little man, or a little big man, or a weak Head of a strong
Department, but he called on the biggest and strongest man that the Government
owned, and explained that he wanted an appointment at Simla on a good salary.
The compound insolence of this amused the Strong Man, and, as he had nothing
to do for the moment, he listened to the proposals of the audacious Tarrion.
"You have, I presume, some special qualifications, besides the gift of self-
assertion, for the claims you put forwards?" said the Strong Man. "That, Sir,"
said Tarrion, "is for you to judge." Then he began, for he had a good memory,
quoting a few of the more important notes in the papers--slowly and one by one
as a man drops chlorodyne into a glass. When he had reached the peremptory
order--and it WAS a peremptory order--the Strong Man was troubled.
Tarrion wound up:--"And I fancy that special knowledge of this kind is at
least as valuable for, let us say, a berth in the Foreign Office, as the fact
of being the nephew of a distinguished officer's wife." That hit the Strong
Man hard, for the last appointment to the Foreign Office had been by black
favor, and he knew it. "I'll see what I can do for you," said the Strong Man.
"Many thanks," said Tarrion. Then he left, and the Strong Man departed to see
how the appointment was to be blocked.
. . . . . . . . .
Followed a pause of eleven days; with thunders and lightnings and much
telegraphing. The appointment was not a very important one, carrying only
between Rs. 500 and Rs. 700 a month; but, as the Viceroy said, it was the
principle of diplomatic secrecy that had to be maintained, and it was more
than likely that a boy so well supplied with special information would be
worth translating. So they translated him. They must have suspected him,
though he protested that his information was due to singular talents of his
own. Now, much of this story, including the after-history of the missing
envelope, you must fill in for yourself, because there are reasons why it
cannot be written. If you do not know about things Up Above, you won't
understand how to fill it in, and you will say it is impossible.
What the Viceroy said when Tarrion was introduced to him was:--"So, this is
the boy who 'rusked' the Government of India, is it? Recollect, Sir, that is
not done TWICE." So he must have known something.
What Tarrion said when he saw his appointment gazetted was:--"If Mrs. Hauksbee
were twenty years younger, and I her husband, I should be Viceroy of India in
twenty years."
What Mrs. Hauksbee said, when Tarrion thanked her, almost with tears in his
eyes, was first:--"I told you so!" and next, to herself:--"What fools men
are!"
THE CONVERSION OF AURELIAN McGOGGIN.
Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused heel.
But, once in a way, there will come a day
When the colt must be taught to feel
The lash that falls, and the curb that galls,
And the sting of the rowelled steel.
--Life's Handicap.
This is not a tale exactly. It is a Tract; and I am immensely proud of it.
Making a Tract is a Feat.
Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man--least of all
a junior--has a right to thrust these down other men's throats. The Government
sends out weird Civilians now and again; but McGoggin was the queerest
exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly clever--but his
cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping to the study of the
vernaculars, he had read some books written by a man called Comte, I think,
and a man called Spencer, and a Professor Clifford. [You will find these books
in the Library.] They deal with people's insides from the point of view of men
who have no stomachs. There was no order against his reading them; but his
Mamma should have smacked him.
They fermented in his head, and he came out to India with a rarefied religion
over and above his work. It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men
had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry
along somehow for the good of Humanity.
One of its minor tenets seemed to be that the one thing more sinful than
giving an order was obeying it. At least, that was what McGoggin said; but I
suspect he had misread his primers.
I do not say a word against this creed. It was made up in Town, where there is
nothing but machinery and asphalt and building--all shut in by the fog.
Naturally, a man grows to think that there is no one higher than himself, and
that the Metropolitan Board of Works made everything. But in this country,
where you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing
between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth
underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back to simpler
theories. Life, in India, is not long enough to waste in proving that there is
no one in particular at the head of affairs.
For this reason. The Deputy is above the Assistant, the Commissioner above the
Deputy, the Lieutenant-Governor above the Commissioner, and the Viceroy above
all four, under the orders of the Secretary of State, who is responsible to
the Empress. If the Empress be not responsible to her Maker--if there is no
Maker for her to be responsible to--the entire system of Our administration
must be wrong. Which is manifestly impossible. At Home men are to be excused.
They are stalled up a good deal and get intellectually "beany." When you take
a gross, 'beany" horse to exercise, he slavers and slobbers over the bit till
you can't see the horns.
But the bit is there just the same. Men do not get "beany" in India. The
climate and the work are against playing bricks with words.
If McGoggin had kept his creed, with the capital letters and the endings in
"isms," to himself, no one would have cared; but his grandfathers on both
sides had been Wesleyan preachers, and the preaching strain came out in his
mind. He wanted every one at the Club to see that they had no souls too, and
to help him to eliminate his Creator. As a good many men told him, HE
undoubtedly had no soul, because he was so young, but it did not follow that
his seniors were equally undeveloped; and, whether there was another world or
not, a man still wanted to read his papers in this. "But that is not the
point--that is not the point!" Aurelian used to say. Then men threw sofa-
cushions at him and told him to go to any particular place he might believe
in. They christened him the "Blastoderm"--he said he came from a family of
that name somewhere, in the pre-historic ages--and, by insult and laughter,
strove to choke him dumb, for he was an unmitigated nuisance at the Club;
besides being an offence to the older men. His Deputy Commissioner, who was
working on the Frontier when Aurelian was rolling on a bed-quilt, told him
that, for a clever boy, Aurelian was a very big idiot. And, you know, if he
had gone on with his work, he would have been caught up to the Secretariat in
a few years. He was just the type that goes there--all head, no physique and a
hundred theories. Not a soul was interested in McGoggin's soul. He might have
had two, or none, or somebody's else's. His business was to obey orders and
keep abreast of his files instead of devastating the Club with "isms."
He worked brilliantly; but he could not accept any order without trying to
better it. That was the fault of his creed. It made men too responsible and
left too much to their honor. You can sometimes ride an old horse in a halter;
but never a colt.
McGoggin took more trouble over his cases than any of the men of his year. He
may have fancied that thirty-page judgments on fifty-rupee cases--both sides
perjured to the gullet--advanced the cause of Humanity. At any rate, he worked
too much, and worried and fretted over the rebukes he received, and lectured
away on his ridiculous creed out of office, till the Doctor had to warn him
that he was overdoing it. No man can toil eighteen annas in the rupee in June
without suffering. But McGoggin was still intellectually "beany" and proud of
himself and his powers, and he would take no hint. He worked nine hours a day
steadily.
"Very well," said the doctor, "you'll break down because you are over-engined
for your beam." McGoggin was a little chap.
One day, the collapse came--as dramatically as if it had been meant to
embellish a Tract.
It was just before the Rains. We were sitting in the verandah in the dead,
hot, close air, gasping and praying that the black-blue clouds would let down
and bring the cool. Very, very far away, there was a faint whisper, which was
the roar of the Rains breaking over the river. One of the men heard it, got
out of his chair, listened, and said, naturally enough:--"Thank God!"
Then the Blastoderm turned in his place and said:--"Why? I assure you it's
only the result of perfectly natural causes--atmospheric phenomena of the
simplest kind. Why you should, therefore, return thanks to a Being who never
did exist--who is only a figment--"
"Blastoderm," grunted the man in the next chair, "dry up, and throw me over
the Pioneer. We know all about your figments." The Blastoderm reached out to
the table, took up one paper, and jumped as if something had stung him. Then
he handed the paper over.
"As I was saying," he went on slowly and with an effort--"due to perfectly
natural causes--perfectly natural causes. I mean--"
"Hi! Blastoderm, you've given me the Calcutta Mercantile Advertiser."
The dust got up in little whorls, while the treetops rocked and the kites
whistled. But no one was looking at the coming of the Rains.
We were all staring at the Blastoderm, who had risen from his chair and was
fighting with his speech. Then he said, still more slowly:--
"Perfectly conceivable--dictionary--red oak--amenable--cause--retaining--
shuttlecock--alone."
"Blastoderm's drunk," said one man. But the Blastoderm was not drunk. He
looked at us in a dazed sort of way, and began motioning with his hands in the
half light as the clouds closed overhead.
Then--with a scream:--
"What is it?--Can't--reserve--attainable--market--obscure--"
But his speech seemed to freeze in him, and--just as the lightning shot two
tongues that cut the whole sky into three pieces and the rain fell in
quivering sheets--the Blastoderm was struck dumb. He stood pawing and champing
like a hard-held horse, and his eyes were full of terror.
The Doctor came over in three minutes, and heard the story. "It's aphasia," he
said. "Take him to his room. I KNEW the smash would come." We carried the
Blastoderm across, in the pouring rain, to his quarters, and the Doctor gave
him bromide of potassium to make him sleep.
Then the Doctor came back to us and told us that aphasia was like all the
arrears of "Punjab Head" falling in a lump; and that only once before--in the
case of a sepoy--had he met with so complete a case. I myself have seen mild
aphasia in an overworked man, but this sudden dumbness was uncanny--though, as
the Blastoderm himself might have said, due to "perfectly natural causes."
"He'll have to take leave after this," said the Doctor. "He won't be fit for
work for another three months. No; it isn't insanity or anything like it. It's
only complete loss of control over the speech and memory. I fancy it will keep
the Blastoderm quiet, though."
Two days later, the Blastoderm found his tongue again. The first question he
asked was: "What was it?" The Doctor enlightened him.
"But I can't understand it!" said the Blastoderm; "I'm quite sane; but I can't
be sure of my mind, it seems--my OWN memory--can I?"
"Go up into the Hills for three months, and don't think about it," said the
Doctor.
"But I can't understand it," repeated the Blastoderm. "It was my OWN mind and
memory."
"I can't help it," said the Doctor; "there are a good many things you can't
understand; and, by the time you have put in my length of service, you'll know
exactly how much a man dare call his own in this world."
The stroke cowed the Blastoderm. He could not understand it. He went into the
Hills in fear and trembling, wondering whether he would be permitted to reach
the end of any sentence he began.
This gave him a wholesome feeling of mistrust. The legitimate explanation,
that he had been overworking himself, failed to satisfy him. Something had
wiped his lips of speech, as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and
he was afraid--horribly afraid.
So the Club had rest when he returned; and if ever you come across Aurelian
McGoggin laying down the law on things Human--he doesn't seem to know as much
as he used to about things Divine--put your forefinger on your lip for a
moment, and see what happens.
Don't blame me if he throws a glass at your head!
A GERM DESTROYER.
Pleasant it is for the Little Tin Gods,
When great Jove nods;
But Little Tin Gods make their little mistakes
In missing the hour when great Jove wakes.
As a general rule, it is inexpedient to meddle with questions of State in a
land where men are highly paid to work them out for you.
This tale is a justifiable exception.
Once in every five years, as you know, we indent for a new Viceroy; and each
Viceroy imports, with the rest of his baggage, a Private Secretary, who may or
may not be the real Viceroy, just as Fate ordains. Fate looks after the Indian
Empire because it is so big and so helpless.
There was a Viceroy once, who brought out with him a turbulent Private
Secretary--a hard man with a soft manner and a morbid passion for work. This
Secretary was called Wonder--John Fennil Wonder. The Viceroy possessed no
name--nothing but a string of counties and two-thirds of the alphabet after
them. He said, in confidence, that he was the electro-plated figurehead of a
golden administration, and he watched in a dreamy, amused way Wonder's
attempts to draw matters which were entirely outside his province into his own
hands. "When we are all cherubims together," said His Excellency once, "my
dear, good friend Wonder will head the conspiracy for plucking out Gabriel's
tail-feathers or stealing Peter's keys. THEN I shall report him."
But, though the Viceroy did nothing to check Wonder's officiousness, other
people said unpleasant things. Maybe the Members of Council began it; but,
finally, all Simla agreed that there was "too much Wonder, and too little
Viceroy," in that regime. Wonder was always quoting "His Excellency." It was
"His Excellency this," "His Excellency that," "In the opinion of His
Excellency," and so on. The Viceroy smiled; but he did not heed.
He said that, so long as his old men squabbled with his "dear, good Wonder,"
they might be induced to leave the "Immemorial East" in peace.
"No wise man has a policy," said the Viceroy. "A Policy is the blackmail
levied on the Fool by the Unforeseen. I am not the former, and I do not
believe in the latter."
I do not quite see what this means, unless it refers to an Insurance Policy.
Perhaps it was the Viceroy's way of saying:--"Lie low."
That season, came up to Simla one of these crazy people with only a single
idea. These are the men who make things move; but they are not nice to talk
to. This man's name was Mellish, and he had lived for fifteen years on land of
his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera. He held that cholera was a germ
that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the
branches of trees like a wool-flake. The germ could be rendered sterile, he
said, by "Mellish's Own Invincible Fumigatory"--a heavy violet-black powder--
"the result of fifteen years' scientific investigation, Sir!"
Inventors seem very much alike as a caste. They talk loudly, especially about
"conspiracies of monopolists;" they beat upon the table with their fists; and
they secrete fragments of their inventions about their persons.
Mellish said that there was a Medical "Ring" at Simla, headed by the Surgeon-
General, who was in league, apparently, with all the Hospital Assistants in
the Empire. I forget exactly how he proved it, but it had something to do with
"skulking up to the Hills;" and what Mellish wanted was the independent
evidence of the Viceroy--"Steward of our Most Gracious Majesty the Queen,
Sir." So Mellish went up to Simla, with eighty-four pounds of Fumigatory in
his trunk, to speak to the Viceroy and to show him the merits of the
invention.
But it is easier to see a Viceroy than to talk to him, unless you chance to be
as important as Mellishe of Madras. He was a six-thousand-rupee man, so great
that his daughters never "married." They "contracted alliances." He himself
was not paid. He "received emoluments," and his journeys about the country
were "tours of observation." His business was to stir up the people in Madras
with a long pole--as you stir up stench in a pond--and the people had to come
up out of their comfortable old ways and gasp:--"This is Enlightenment and
progress. Isn't it fine!" Then they gave Mellishe statues and jasmine
garlands, in the hope of getting rid of him.
Mellishe came up to Simla "to confer with the Viceroy." That was one of his
perquisites. The Viceroy knew nothing of Mellishe except that he was "one of
those middle-class deities who seem necessary to the spiritual comfort of this
Paradise of the Middle-classes," and that, in all probability, he had
"suggested, designed, founded, and endowed all the public institutions in
Madras." Which proves that His Excellency, though dreamy, had experience of
the ways of six-thousand-rupee men.
Mellishe's name was E. Mellishe and Mellish's was E. S. Mellish, and they were
both staying at the same hotel, and the Fate that looks after the Indian
Empire ordained that Wonder should blunder and drop the final "e;" that the
Chaprassi should help him, and that the note which ran: "Dear Mr. Mellish.--
Can you set aside your other engagements and lunch with us at two tomorrow?
His Excellency has an hour at your disposal then," should be given to Mellish
with the Fumigatory. He nearly wept with pride and delight, and at the
appointed hour cantered off to Peterhoff, a big paper-bag full of the
Fumigatory in his coat-tail pockets. He had his chance, and he meant to make
the most of it. Mellishe of Madras had been so portentously solemn about his
"conference," that Wonder had arranged for a private tiffin--no A.-D.-C.'s, no
Wonder, no one but the Viceroy, who said plaintively that he feared being left
alone with unmuzzled autocrats like the great Mellishe of Madras.
But his guest did not bore the Viceroy. On the contrary, he amused him.
Mellish was nervously anxious to go straight to his Fumigatory, and talked at
random until tiffin was over and His Excellency asked him to smoke. The
Viceroy was pleased with Mellish because he did not talk "shop."
As soon as the cheroots were lit, Mellish spoke like a man; beginning with his
cholera-theory, reviewing his fifteen years' "scientific labors," the
machinations of the "Simla Ring," and the excellence of his Fumigatory, while
the Viceroy watched him between half-shut eyes and thought: "Evidently, this
is the wrong tiger; but it is an original animal." Mellish's hair was standing
on end with excitement, and he stammered. He began groping in his coat-tails
and, before the Viceroy knew what was about to happen, he had tipped a bagful
of his powder into the big silver ash-tray.
"J-j-judge for yourself, Sir," said Mellish. "Y' Excellency shall judge for
yourself! Absolutely infallible, on my honor."
He plunged the lighted end of his cigar into the powder, which began to smoke
like a volcano, and send up fat, greasy wreaths of copper-colored smoke. In
five seconds the room was filled with a most pungent and sickening stench--a
reek that took fierce hold of the trap of your windpipe and shut it. The
powder then hissed and fizzed, and sent out blue and green sparks, and the
smoke rose till you could neither see, nor breathe, nor gasp. Mellish,
however, was used to it.
"Nitrate of strontia," he shouted; "baryta, bone-meal, etcetera! Thousand
cubic feet smoke per cubic inch. Not a germ could live--not a germ, Y'
Excellency!"
But His Excellency had fled, and was coughing at the foot of the stairs, while
all Peterhoff hummed like a hive. Red Lancers came in, and the Head Chaprassi,
who speaks English, came in, and mace-bearers came in, and ladies ran
downstairs screaming "fire;" for the smoke was drifting through the house and
oozing out of the windows, and bellying along the verandahs, and wreathing and
writhing across the gardens. No one could enter the room where Mellish was
lecturing on his Fumigatory, till that unspeakable powder had burned itself
out.
Then an Aide-de-Camp, who desired the V. C., rushed through the rolling clouds
and hauled Mellish into the hall. The Viceroy was prostrate with laughter, and
could only waggle his hands feebly at Mellish, who was shaking a fresh bagful
of powder at him.
"Glorious! Glorious!" sobbed his Excellency. "Not a germ, as you justly
observe, could exist! I can swear it. A magnificent success!"
Then he laughed till the tears came, and Wonder, who had caught the real
Mellishe snorting on the Mall, entered and was deeply shocked at the scene.
But the Viceroy was delighted, because he saw that Wonder would presently
depart. Mellish with the Fumigatory was also pleased, for he felt that he had
smashed the Simla Medical "Ring."
. . . . . . . . .
Few men could tell a story like His Excellency when he took the trouble, and
the account of "my dear, good Wonder's friend with the powder" went the round
of Simla, and flippant folk made Wonder unhappy by their remarks.
But His Excellency told the tale once too often--for Wonder. As he meant to
do. It was at a Seepee Picnic. Wonder was sitting just behind the Viceroy.
"And I really thought for a moment," wound up His Excellency, "that my dear,
good Wonder had hired an assassin to clear his way to the throne!"
Every one laughed; but there was a delicate subtinkle in the Viceroy's tone
which Wonder understood. He found that his health was giving way; and the
Viceroy allowed him to go, and presented him with a flaming "character" for
use at Home among big people.
"My fault entirely," said His Excellency, in after seasons, with a twinkling
in his eye. "My inconsistency must always have been distasteful to such a
masterly man."
KIDNAPPED.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken any way you please, is bad,
And strands them in forsaken guts and creeks
No decent soul would think of visiting.
You cannot stop the tide; but now and then,
You may arrest some rash adventurer
Who--h'm--will hardly thank you for your pains.
--Vibart's Moralities.
We are a high-caste and enlightened race, and infant-marriage is very shocking
and the consequences are sometimes peculiar; but, nevertheless, the Hindu
notion--which is the Continental notion--which is the aboriginal notion--of
arranging marriages irrespective of the personal inclinations of the married,
is sound. Think for a minute, and you will see that it must be so; unless, of
course, you believe in "affinities." In which case you had better not read
this tale. How can a man who has never married; who cannot be trusted to pick
up at sight a moderately sound horse; whose head is hot and upset with visions
of domestic felicity, go about the choosing of a wife? He cannot see straight
or think straight if he tries; and the same disadvantages exist in the case of
a girl's fancies. But when mature, married and discreet people arrange a match
between a boy and a girl, they do it sensibly, with a view to the future, and
the young couple live happily ever afterwards. As everybody knows.
Properly speaking, Government should establish a Matrimonial Department,
efficiently officered, with a Jury of Matrons, a Judge of the Chief Court, a
Senior Chaplain, and an Awful Warning, in the shape of a love-match that has
gone wrong, chained to the trees in the courtyard. All marriages should be
made through the Department, which might be subordinate to the Educational
Department, under the same penalty as that attaching to the transfer of land
without a stamped document. But Government won't take suggestions. It pretends
that it is too busy. However, I will put my notion on record, and explain the
example that illustrates the theory.
Once upon a time there was a good young man--a first-class officer in his own
Department--a man with a career before him and, possibly, a K. C. G. E. at the
end of it. All his superiors spoke well of him, because he knew how to hold
his tongue and his pen at the proper times. There are today only eleven men in
India who possess this secret; and they have all, with one exception, attained
great honor and enormous incomes.
This good young man was quiet and self-contained--too old for his years by
far. Which always carries its own punishment. Had a Subaltern, or a Tea-
Planter's Assistant, or anybody who enjoys life and has no care for tomorrow,
done what he tried to do not a soul would have cared. But when Peythroppe--the
estimable, virtuous, economical, quiet, hard-working, young Peythroppe--fell,
there was a flutter through five Departments.
The manner of his fall was in this way. He met a Miss Castries--d'Castries it
was originally, but the family dropped the d' for administrative reasons--and
he fell in love with her even more energetically than he worked. Understand
clearly that there was not a breath of a word to be said against Miss
Castries--not a shadow of a breath. She was good and very lovely--possessed
what innocent people at home call a "Spanish" complexion, with thick blue-
black hair growing low down on her forehead, into a "widow's peak," and big
violet eyes under eyebrows as black and as straight as the borders of a
Gazette Extraordinary when a big man dies. But--but--but--. Well, she was a
VERY sweet girl and very pious, but for many reasons she was "impossible."
Quite so. All good Mammas know what "impossible" means. It was obviously
absurd that Peythroppe should marry her. The little opal-tinted onyx at the
base of her finger-nails said this as plainly as print. Further, marriage with
Miss Castries meant marriage with several other Castries--Honorary Lieutenant
Castries, her Papa, Mrs. Eulalie Castries, her Mamma, and all the
ramifications of the Castries family, on incomes ranging from Rs. 175 to Rs.
470 a month, and THEIR wives and connections again.
It would have been cheaper for Peythroppe to have assaulted a Commissioner
with a dog-whip, or to have burned the records of a Deputy Commissioner's
Office, than to have contracted an alliance with the Castries. It would have
weighted his after-career less--even under a Government which never forgets
and NEVER forgives.
Everybody saw this but Peythroppe. He was going to marry Miss Castries, he
was--being of age and drawing a good income--and woe betide the house that
would not afterwards receive Mrs. Virginie Saulez Peythroppe with the
deference due to her husband's rank.
That was Peythroppe's ultimatum, and any remonstrance drove him frantic.
These sudden madnesses most afflict the sanest men. There was a case once--but
I will tell you of that later on. You cannot account for the mania, except
under a theory directly contradicting the one about the Place wherein
marriages are made. Peythroppe was burningly anxious to put a millstone round
his neck at the outset of his career and argument had not the least effect on
him. He was going to marry Miss Castries, and the business was his own
business.
He would thank you to keep your advice to yourself. With a man in this
condition, mere words only fix him in his purpose. Of course he cannot see
that marriage out here does not concern the individual but the Government he
serves.
Do you remember Mrs. Hauksbee--the most wonderful woman in India? She saved
Pluffles from Mrs. Reiver, won Tarrion his appointment in the Foreign Office,
and was defeated in open field by Mrs. Cusack-Bremmil. She heard of the
lamentable condition of Peythroppe, and her brain struck out the plan that
saved him. She had the wisdom of the Serpent, the logical coherence of the
Man, the fearlessness of the Child, and the triple intuition of the Woman.
Never--no, never--as long as a tonga buckets down the Solon dip, or the
couples go a-riding at the back of Summer Hill, will there be such a genius as
Mrs. Hauksbee. She attended the consultation of Three Men on Peythroppe's
case; and she stood up with the lash of her riding-whip between her lips and
spake.
. . . . . . . . .
Three weeks later, Peythroppe dined with the Three Men, and the Gazette of
India came in. Peythroppe found to his surprise that he had been gazetted a
month's leave. Don't ask me how this was managed. I believe firmly that if
Mrs. Hauksbee gave the order, the whole Great Indian Administration would
stand on its head.
The Three Men had also a month's leave each. Peythroppe put the Gazette down
and said bad words. Then there came from the compound the soft "pad-pad" of
camels--"thieves' camels," the bikaneer breed that don't bubble and howl when
they sit down and get up.
After that I don't know what happened. This much is certain.
Peythroppe disappeared--vanished like smoke--and the long foot-rest chair in
the house of the Three Men was broken to splinters. Also a bedstead departed
from one of the bedrooms.
Mrs. Hauksbee said that Mr. Peythroppe was shooting in Rajputana with the
Three Men; so we were compelled to believe her.
At the end of the month, Peythroppe was gazetted twenty days' extension of
leave; but there was wrath and lamentation in the house of Castries. The
marriage-day had been fixed, but the bridegroom never came; and the D'Silvas,
Pereiras, and Ducketts lifted their voices and mocked Honorary Lieutenant
Castries as one who had been basely imposed upon. Mrs. Hauksbee went to the
wedding, and was much astonished when Peythroppe did not appear. After seven
weeks, Peythroppe and the Three Men returned from Rajputana. Peythroppe was in
hard, tough condition, rather white, and more self-contained than ever.
One of the Three Men had a cut on his nose, cause by the kick of a gun.
Twelve-bores kick rather curiously.
Then came Honorary Lieutenant Castries, seeking for the blood of his
perfidious son-in-law to be. He said things--vulgar and "impossible" things
which showed the raw rough "ranker" below the "Honorary," and I fancy
Peythroppe's eyes were opened. Anyhow, he held his peace till the end; when he
spoke briefly. Honorary Lieutenant Castries asked for a "peg" before he went
away to die or bring a suit for breach of promise.
Miss Castries was a very good girl. She said that she would have no breach of
promise suits. She said that, if she was not a lady, she was refined enough to
know that ladies kept their broken hearts to themselves; and, as she ruled her
parents, nothing happened. Later on, she married a most respectable and
gentlemanly person. He travelled for an enterprising firm in Calcutta, and was
all that a good husband should be.
So Peythroppe came to his right mind again, and did much good work, and was
honored by all who knew him. One of these days he will marry; but he will
marry a sweet pink-and-white maiden, on the Government House List, with a
little money and some influential connections, as every wise man should. And
he will never, all his life, tell her what happened during the seven weeks of
his shooting-tour in Rajputana.
But just think how much trouble and expense--for camel hire is not cheap, and
those Bikaneer brutes had to be fed like humans--might have been saved by a
properly conducted Matrimonial Department, under the control of the Director
General of Education, but corresponding direct with the Viceroy.
THE ARREST OF LIEUTENANT GOLIGHTLY.
"'I've forgotten the countersign,' sez 'e.
'Oh! You 'ave, 'ave you?' sez I.
'But I'm the Colonel,' sez 'e.
'Oh! You are, are you?' sez I. 'Colonel nor no Colonel, you waits 'ere till
I'm relieved, an' the Sarjint reports on your ugly old mug. Coop!' sez I.
. . . . . . . . .
An' s'help me soul, 'twas the Colonel after all! But I was a recruity then."
The Unedited Autobiography of Private Ortheris.
IF there was one thing on which Golightly prided himself more than another, it
was looking like "an Officer and a gentleman." He said it was for the honor of
the Service that he attired himself so elaborately; but those who knew him
best said that it was just personal vanity. There was no harm about Golightly-
-not an ounce.
He recognized a horse when he saw one, and could do more than fill a cantle.
He played a very fair game at billiards, and was a sound man at the whist-
table. Everyone liked him; and nobody ever dreamed of seeing him handcuffed on
a station platform as a deserter. But this sad thing happened.
He was going down from Dalhousie, at the end of his leave--riding down. He had
cut his leave as fine as he dared, and wanted to come down in a hurry.
It was fairly warm at Dalhousie, and knowing what to expect below, he
descended in a new khaki suit--tight fitting--of a delicate olive-green; a
peacock-blue tie, white collar, and a snowy white solah helmet. He prided
himself on looking neat even when he was riding post. He did look neat, and he
was so deeply concerned about his appearance before he started that he quite
forgot to take anything but some small change with him. He left all his notes
at the hotel. His servants had gone down the road before him, to be ready in
waiting at Pathankote with a change of gear. That was what he called
travelling in "light marching-order." He was proud of his faculty of
organization--what we call bundobust.
Twenty-two miles out of Dalhousie it began to rain--not a mere hill-shower,
but a good, tepid monsoonish downpour. Golightly bustled on, wishing that he
had brought an umbrella. The dust on the roads turned into mud, and the pony
mired a good deal. So did Golightly's khaki gaiters. But he kept on steadily
and tried to think how pleasant the coolth was.
His next pony was rather a brute at starting, and Golightly's hands being
slippery with the rain, contrived to get rid of Golightly at a corner. He
chased the animal, caught it, and went ahead briskly.
The spill had not improved his clothes or his temper, and he had lost one
spur. He kept the other one employed. By the time that stage was ended, the
pony had had as much exercise as he wanted, and, in spite of the rain,
Golightly was sweating freely. At the end of another miserable half-hour,
Golightly found the world disappear before his eyes in clammy pulp. The rain
had turned the pith of his huge and snowy solah-topee into an evil-smelling
dough, and it had closed on his head like a half-opened mushroom. Also the
green lining was beginning to run.
Golightly did not say anything worth recording here. He tore off and squeezed
up as much of the brim as was in his eyes and ploughed on. The back of the
helmet was flapping on his neck and the sides stuck to his ears, but the
leather band and green lining kept things roughly together, so that the hat
did not actually melt away where it flapped.
Presently, the pulp and the green stuff made a sort of slimy mildew which ran
over Golightly in several directions--down his back and bosom for choice. The
khaki color ran too--it was really shockingly bad dye--and sections of
Golightly were brown, and patches were violet, and contours were ochre, and
streaks were ruddy red, and blotches were nearly white, according to the
nature and peculiarities of the dye. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe
his face and the green of the hat-lining and the purple stuff that had soaked
through on to his neck from the tie became thoroughly mixed, the effect was
amazing.
Near Dhar the rain stopped and the evening sun came out and dried him up
slightly. It fixed the colors, too. Three miles from Pathankote the last pony
fell dead lame, and Golightly was forced to walk. He pushed on into Pathankote
to find his servants. He did not know then that his khitmatgar had stopped by
the roadside to get drunk, and would come on the next day saying that he had
sprained his ankle. When he got into Pathankote, he couldn't find his
servants, his boots were stiff and ropy with mud, and there were large
quantities of dirt about his body. The blue tie had run as much as the khaki.
So he took it off with the collar and threw it away. Then he said something
about servants generally and tried to get a peg. He paid eight annas for the
drink, and this revealed to him that he had only six annas more in his pocket-
-or in the world as he stood at that hour.
He went to the Station-Master to negotiate for a first-class ticket to Khasa,
where he was stationed. The booking-clerk said something to the Station-
Master, the Station-Master said something to the Telegraph Clerk, and the
three looked at him with curiosity. They asked him to wait for half-an-hour,
while they telegraphed to Umritsar for authority. So he waited, and four
constables came and grouped themselves picturesquely round him. Just as he was
preparing to ask them to go away, the Station-Master said that he would give
the Sahib a ticket to Umritsar, if the Sahib would kindly come inside the
booking-office. Golightly stepped inside, and the next thing he knew was that
a constable was attached to each of his legs and arms, while the Station-
Master was trying to cram a mailbag over his head.
There was a very fair scuffle all round the booking-office, and Golightly
received a nasty cut over his eye through falling against a table. But the
constables were too much for him, and they and the Station-Master handcuffed
him securely. As soon as the mail-bag was slipped, he began expressing his
opinions, and the head-constable said:--"Without doubt this is the soldier-
Englishman we required. Listen to the abuse!" Then Golightly asked the
Station-Master what the this and the that the proceedings meant. The Station-
Master told him he was "Private John Binkle of the----Regiment, 5 ft. 9 in.,
fair hair, gray eyes, and a dissipated appearance, no marks on the body," who
had deserted a fortnight ago. Golightly began explaining at great length; and
the more he explained the less the Station-Master believed him. He said that
no Lieutenant could look such a ruffian as did Golightly, and that his
instructions were to send his capture under proper escort to Umritsar.
Golightly was feeling very damp and uncomfortable, and the language he used
was not fit for publication, even in an expurgated form. The four constables
saw him safe to Umritsar in an "intermediate" compartment, and he spent the
four-hour journey in abusing them as fluently as his knowledge of the
vernaculars allowed.
At Umritsar he was bundled out on the platform into the arms of a Corporal and
two men of the----Regiment. Golightly drew himself up and tried to carry off
matters jauntily. He did not feel too jaunty in handcuffs, with four
constables behind him, and the blood from the cut on his forehead stiffening
on his left cheek. The Corporal was not jocular either. Golightly got as far
as--"This is a very absurd mistake, my men," when the Corporal told him to
"stow his lip" and come along. Golightly did not want to come along. He
desired to stop and explain. He explained very well indeed, until the Corporal
cut in with:--"YOU a orficer! It's the like o' YOU as brings disgrace on the
likes of US. Bloom-in' fine orficer you are! I know your regiment. The Rogue's
March is the quickstep where you come from. You're a black shame to the
Service."
Golightly kept his temper, and began explaining all over again from the
beginning. Then he was marched out of the rain into the refreshment-room and
told not to make a qualified fool of himself.
The men were going to run him up to Fort Govindghar. And "running up" is a
performance almost as undignified as the Frog March.
Golightly was nearly hysterical with rage and the chill and the mistake and
the handcuffs and the headache that the cut on his forehead had given him. He
really laid himself out to express what was in his mind. When he had quite
finished and his throat was feeling dry, one of the men said:--"I've 'eard a
few beggars in the click blind, stiff and crack on a bit; but I've never 'eard
any one to touch this 'ere 'orficer.'" They were not angry with him. They
rather admired him. They had some beer at the refreshment-room, and offered
Golightly some too, because he had "swore won'erful." They asked him to tell
them all about the adventures of Private John Binkle while he was loose on the
countryside; and that made Golightly wilder than ever. If he had kept his wits
about him he would have kept quiet until an officer came; but he attempted to
run.
Now the butt of a Martini in the small of your back hurts a great deal, and
rotten, rain-soaked khaki tears easily when two men are jerking at your
collar.
Golightly rose from the floor feeling very sick and giddy, with his shirt
ripped open all down his breast and nearly all down his back.
He yielded to his luck, and at that point the down-train from Lahore came in
carrying one of Golightly's Majors.
This is the Major's evidence in full:--
"There was the sound of a scuffle in the second-class refreshment-room, so I
went in and saw the most villainous loafer that I ever set eyes on. His boots
and breeches were plastered with mud and beer-stains. He wore a muddy-white
dunghill sort of thing on his head, and it hung down in slips on his
shoulders, which were a good deal scratched. He was half in and half out of a
shirt as nearly in two pieces as it could be, and he was begging the guard to
look at the name on the tail of it. As he had rucked the shirt all over his
head, I couldn't at first see who he was, but I fancied that he was a man in
the first stage of D. T. from the way he swore while he wrestled with his
rags. When he turned round, and I had made allowance for a lump as big as a
pork-pie over one eye, and some green war-paint on the face, and some violet
stripes round the neck, I saw that it was Golightly. He was very glad to see
me," said the Major, "and he hoped I would not tell the Mess about it. I
didn't, but you can if you like, now that Golightly has gone Home."
Golightly spent the greater part of that summer in trying to get the Corporal
and the two soldiers tried by Court-Martial for arresting an "officer and a
gentleman." They were, of course, very sorry for their error. But the tale
leaked into the regimental canteen, and thence ran about the Province.
THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO
A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange;
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company tonight,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
--From the Dusk to the Dawn.
The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four carved
windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red
hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the
upper windows. Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, and a man who says he gets his living
by seal-cutting, live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants,
friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and
Azizun and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman's
house and given to Janoo by a soldier. Today, only Janoo lives in the upper
rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the
street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son, who
sells curiosities near the Edwardes' Gate, and then he slept under a real mud
roof.
Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured,
thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the
Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these
days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white
hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits--outlived nearly
everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are
Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less
honorable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the
North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near
Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich.
The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very
poor.
This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in
the house of Suddhoo. Then there is Me, of course; but I am only the chorus
that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.
Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest
of them all--Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie--except Janoo. She was also
beautiful, but that was her own affair.
Suddhoo's son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was
troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo's anxiety and made capital out
of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph
daily accounts of the son's health.
And here the story begins.
Suddhoo's cousin's son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me;
that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be
conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I
went; but I think, seeing how well-off Suddhoo was then, that he might have
sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a
future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April evening. The ekka did
not run quickly.
It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh's Tomb
near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo and he said that, by reason
of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a
Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the
weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes,
in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.
Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there
was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was feared that magic
might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn't know anything about the
state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to
happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it
was highly commended.
The greatest officials of the State practiced it themselves. (If the Financial
Statement isn't magic, I don't know what is.) Then, to encourage him further,
I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least objection to
giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean jadoo--
white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoo which kills folk. It took
a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to
come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut
seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news
of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and
that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had
told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be
removed by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see how the
land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadoo in the
Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done
decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me he
had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already;
and the jadoo of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he
said, considering the greatness of his son's danger; but I do not think he
meant it.
The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could
hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter's shop-front, as if some one
were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our
way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the
stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-work was coming off in their rooms,
because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a freethinking turn of
mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of
Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died.
Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down
the room in the half light, repeating his son's name over and over again, and
asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of
his own landlord.
Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows.
The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny lamp. There was no
chance of my being seen if I stayed still.
Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That
was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and
Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This
left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas
that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard
Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath,
and Janoo backed to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of
something metallic, and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground.
The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the
room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped,
leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the
seal-cutter.
I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped to
the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round his
forehead, a salmon-colored loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on
each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned
me cold. It was blue-gray in the first place. In the second, the eyes were
rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the
face was the face of a demon--a ghoul--anything you please except of the
sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the day-time over his turning-lathe
downstairs. He was lying on his stomach, with his arms turned and crossed
behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the
only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body,
like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room,
on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-
green light floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the
man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I
could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I
could not see any other motion.
The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and
uncurl of the laboring back-muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy
to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo,
fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to
himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound--
only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier
whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.
I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a
thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most
impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that
unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as high as
he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now, I knew how fire-
spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease. The business was a
fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect,
goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the
jet of fire and the head dropped, chin down, on the floor with a thud; the
whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms trussed.
There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame
died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her
face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm
mechanically to Janoo's huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot.
Directly above the body and on the wall, were a couple of flaming portraits,
in stamped paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked
down on the performance, and, to my thinking, seemed to heighten the
grotesqueness of it all.
Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled
away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach up. There
was a faint "plop" from the basin--exactly like the noise a fish makes when it
takes a fly--and the green light in the centre revived.
I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried, shrivelled,
black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth and shaved scalp. It was
worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to
say anything before it began to speak.
Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man, and
you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that head's voice.
There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of
"ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a bell. It
pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I got rid
of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body
lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on
the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular
breathing, twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction
of the Egyptian teraphin that one read about sometimes and the voice was as
clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear.
All this time the head was "lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin,
and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness
and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always
shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the
Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day
watching over the man's life; and that he would eventually recover if the fee
to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin, were doubled.
Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice
your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose from
the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of masculine intellect, saw
this as quickly as I did. I heard her say "Asli nahin! Fareib!" scornfully
under her breath; and just as she said so, the light in the basin died out,
the head stopped talking, and we heard the room door creak on its hinges. Then
Janoo struck a match, lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin, and seal-
cutter were gone. Suddhoo was wringing his hands and explaining to any one who
cared to listen, that, if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he
could not raise another two hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in
the corner; while Janoo sat down composedly on one of the beds to discuss the
probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or "make-up."
I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter's way of jadoo; but her
argument was much more simple:--"The magic that is always demanding gifts is
no true magic," said she. "My mother told me that the only potent love-spells
are those which are told you for love. This seal-cutter man is a liar and a
devil. I dare not tell, do anything, or get anything done, because I am in
debt to Bhagwan Dass the bunnia for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must
get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and
he would poison my food. A fool's jadoo has been going on for ten days, and
has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and
lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like this till tonight.
Azizun is a fool, and will be a purdah nashin soon. Suddhoo has lost his
strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo many rupees
while he lived, and many more after his death; and behold, he is spending
everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal- cutter!"
Here I said:--"But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of
course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole thing is
child's talk--shame--and senseless."
"Suddhoo IS an old child," said Janoo. "He has lived on the roofs these
seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here to
assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the Sirkar, whose salt he
ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the seal-cutter, and
that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his son. What does Suddhoo
know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have to watch his money going day
by day to that lying beast below."
Janoo stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation; while
Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket in the corner, and Azizun was trying to
guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.
. . . . . . . . .
Now the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge
of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false
pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am
helpless in the matter for these reasons, I cannot inform the Police. What
witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly, Azizun is a
veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly--lost in this big India of ours. I cannot
again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for
certain am I that, not only would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would
end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the
bunnia. Suddhoo is an old dotard; and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke
that the Sirkar rather patronizes the Black Art than otherwise. His son is
well now; but Suddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by
whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily the
money that she hoped to wheedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter, and
becomes daily more furious and sullen.
She will never tell, because she dare not; but, unless something happens to
prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera--the white
arsenic kind--about the middle of May. And thus I shall have to be privy to a
murder in the House of Suddhoo.
HIS WEDDED WIFE.
Cry "Murder!" in the market-place, and each
Will turn upon his neighbor anxious eyes
That ask:--"Art thou the man?"
We hunted Cain,
Some centuries ago, across the world,
That bred the fear our own misdeeds maintain
Today.
--Vibart's Moralities.
Shakespeare says something about worms, or it may be giants or beetles,
turning if you tread on them too severely. The safest plan is never to tread
on a worm--not even on the last new subaltern from Home, with his buttons
hardly out of their tissue paper, and the red of sappy English beef in his
cheeks. This is the story of the worm that turned. For the sake of brevity, we
will call Henry Augustus Ramsay Faizanne, "The Worm," although he really was
an exceedingly pretty boy, without a hair on his face, and with a waist like a
girl's when he came out to the Second "Shikarris" and was made unhappy in
several ways. The "Shikarris" are a high-caste regiment, and you must be able
to do things well--play a banjo or ride more than a little, or sing, or act--
to get on with them.
The Worm did nothing except fall off his pony, and knock chips out of gate-
posts with his trap. Even that became monotonous after a time. He objected to
whist, cut the cloth at billiards, sang out of tune, kept very much to
himself, and wrote to his Mamma and sisters at Home. Four of these five things
were vices which the "Shikarris" objected to and set themselves to eradicate.
Every one knows how subalterns are, by brother subalterns, softened and not
permitted to be ferocious. It is good and wholesome, and does no one any harm,
unless tempers are lost; and then there is trouble. There was a man once--but
that is another story.
The "Shikarris" shikarred The Worm very much, and he bore everything without
winking. He was so good and so anxious to learn, and flushed so pink, that his
education was cut short, and he was left to his own devices by every one
except the Senior Subaltern, who continued to make life a burden to The Worm.
The Senior Subaltern meant no harm; but his chaff was coarse, and he didn't
quite understand where to stop. He had been waiting too long for his company;
and that always sours a man. Also he was in love, which made him worse.
One day, after he had borrowed The Worm's trap for a lady who never existed,
had used it himself all the afternoon, had sent a note to The Worm purporting
to come from the lady, and was telling the Mess all about it, The Worm rose in
his place and said, in his quiet, ladylike voice: "That was a very pretty
sell; but I'll lay you a month's pay to a month's pay when you get your step,
that I work a sell on you that you'll remember for the rest of your days, and
the Regiment after you when you're dead or broke." The Worm wasn't angry in
the least, and the rest of the Mess shouted. Then the Senior Subaltern looked
at The Worm from the boots upwards, and down again, and said, "Done, Baby."
The Worm took the rest of the Mess to witness that the bet had been taken, and
retired into a book with a sweet smile.
Two months passed, and the Senior Subaltern still educated The Worm, who began
to move about a little more as the hot weather came on. I have said that the
Senior Subaltern was in love. The curious thing is that a girl was in love
with the Senior Subaltern. Though the Colonel said awful things, and the
Majors snorted, and married Captains looked unutterable wisdom, and the
juniors scoffed, those two were engaged.
The Senior Subaltern was so pleased with getting his Company and his
acceptance at the same time that he forgot to bother The Worm. The girl was a
pretty girl, and had money of her own. She does not come into this story at
all.
One night, at the beginning of the hot weather, all the Mess, except The Worm,
who had gone to his own room to write Home letters, were sitting on the
platform outside the Mess House. The Band had finished playing, but no one
wanted to go in. And the Captains' wives were there also. The folly of a man
in love is unlimited.
The Senior Subaltern had been holding forth on the merits of the girl he was
engaged to, and the ladies were purring approval, while the men yawned, when
there was a rustle of skirts in the dark, and a tired, faint voice lifted
itself:
"Where's my husband?"
I do not wish in the least to reflect on the morality of the "Shikarris;" but
it is on record that four men jumped up as if they had been shot. Three of
them were married men. Perhaps they were afraid that their wives had come from
Home unbeknownst. The fourth said that he had acted on the impulse of the
moment. He explained this afterwards.
Then the voice cried:--"Oh, Lionel!" Lionel was the Senior Subaltern's name. A
woman came into the little circle of light by the candles on the peg-tables,
stretching out her hands to the dark where the Senior Subaltern was, and
sobbing. We rose to our feet, feeling that things were going to happen and
ready to believe the worst. In this bad, small world of ours, one knows so
little of the life of the next man--which, after all, is entirely his own
concern--that one is not surprised when a crash comes. Anything might turn up
any day for any one. Perhaps the Senior Subaltern had been trapped in his
youth. Men are crippled that way occasionally. We didn't know; we wanted to
hear; and the Captains' wives were as anxious as we. If he HAD been trapped,
he was to be excused; for the woman from nowhere, in the dusty shoes, and gray
travelling dress, was very lovely, with black hair and great eyes full of
tears. She was tall, with a fine figure, and her voice had a running sob in it
pitiful to hear. As soon as the Senior Subaltern stood up, she threw her arms
round his neck, and called him "my darling," and said she could not bear
waiting alone in England, and his letters were so short and cold, and she was
his to the end of the world, and would he forgive her. This did not sound
quite like a lady's way of speaking. It was too demonstrative.
Things seemed black indeed, and the Captains' wives peered under their
eyebrows at the Senior Subaltern, and the Colonel's face set like the Day of
Judgment framed in gray bristles, and no one spoke for a while.
Next the Colonel said, very shortly:--"Well, Sir?" and the woman sobbed
afresh. The Senior Subaltern was half choked with the arms round his neck, but
he gasped out:--"It's a d----d lie! I never had a wife in my life!" "Don't
swear," said the Colonel. "Come into the Mess. We must sift this clear
somehow," and he sighed to himself, for he believed in his "Shikarris," did
the Colonel.
We trooped into the ante-room, under the full lights, and there we saw how
beautiful the woman was. She stood up in the middle of us all, sometimes
choking with crying, then hard and proud, and then holding out her arms to the
Senior Subaltern. It was like the fourth act of a tragedy. She told us how the
Senior Subaltern had married her when he was Home on leave eighteen months
before; and she seemed to know all that we knew, and more too, of his people
and his past life. He was white and ashy gray, trying now and again to break
into the torrent of her words; and we, noting how lovely she was and what a
criminal he looked, esteemed him a beast of the worst kind. We felt sorry for
him, though.
I shall never forget the indictment of the Senior Subaltern by his wife. Nor
will he. It was so sudden, rushing out of the dark, unannounced, into our dull
lives. The Captains' wives stood back; but their eyes were alight, and you
could see that they had already convicted and sentenced the Senior Subaltern.
The Colonel seemed five years older. One Major was shading his eyes with his
hand and watching the woman from underneath it. Another was chewing his
moustache and smiling quietly as if he were witnessing a play. Full in the
open space in the centre, by the whist-tables, the Senior Subaltern's terrier
was hunting for fleas. I remember all this as clearly as though a photograph
were in my hand. I remember the look of horror on the Senior Subaltern's face.
It was rather like seeing a man hanged; but much more interesting. Finally,
the woman wound up by saying that the Senior Subaltern carried a double F. M.
in tattoo on his left shoulder. We all knew that, and to our innocent minds it
seemed to clinch the matter. But one of the Bachelor Majors said very
politely:--"I presume that your marriage certificate would be more to the
purpose?"
That roused the woman. She stood up and sneered at the Senior Subaltern for a
cur, and abused the Major and the Colonel and all the rest. Then she wept, and
then she pulled a paper from her breast, saying imperially:--"Take that! And
let my husband--my lawfully wedded husband--read it aloud--if he dare!"
There was a hush, and the men looked into each other's eyes as the Senior
Subaltern came forward in a dazed and dizzy way, and took the paper. We were
wondering as we stared, whether there was anything against any one of us that
might turn up later on. The Senior Subaltern's throat was dry; but, as he ran
his eye over the paper, he broke out into a hoarse cackle of relief, and said
to the woman:--"You young blackguard!"
But the woman had fled through a door, and on the paper was written:--"This is
to certify that I, The Worm, have paid in full my debts to the Senior
Subaltern, and, further, that the Senior Subaltern is my debtor, by agreement
on the 23d of February, as by the Mess attested, to the extent of one month's
Captain's pay, in the lawful currency of the India Empire."
Then a deputation set off for The Worm's quarters and found him, betwixt and
between, unlacing his stays, with the hat, wig, serge dress, etc., on the bed.
He came over as he was, and the "Shikarris" shouted till the Gunners' Mess
sent over to know if they might have a share of the fun. I think we were all,
except the Colonel and the Senior Subaltern, a little disappointed that the
scandal had come to nothing. But that is human nature. There could be no two
words about The Worm's acting. It leaned as near to a nasty tragedy as
anything this side of a joke can. When most of the Subalterns sat upon him
with sofa-cushions to find out why he had not said that acting was his strong
point, he answered very quietly:--"I don't think you ever asked me. I used to
act at Home with my sisters." But no acting with girls could account for The
Worm's display that night. Personally, I think it was in bad taste.
Besides being dangerous. There is no sort of use in playing with fire, even
for fun.
The "Shikarris" made him President of the Regimental Dramatic Club; and, when
the Senior Subaltern paid up his debt, which he did at once, The Worm sank the
money in scenery and dresses. He was a good Worm; and the "Shikarris" are
proud of him. The only drawback is that he has been christened "Mrs. Senior
Subaltern;" and as there are now two Mrs. Senior Subalterns in the Station,
this is sometimes confusing to strangers.
Later on, I will tell you of a case something like, this, but with all the
jest left out and nothing in it but real trouble.
THE BROKEN LINK HANDICAPPED.
While the snaffle holds, or the "long-neck" stings,
While the big beam tilts, or the last bell rings,
While horses are horses to train and to race,
Then women and wine take a second place
For me--for me--
While a short "ten-three"
Has a field to squander or fence to face!
----Song of the G. R.
There are more ways of running a horse to suit your book than pulling his head
off in the straight. Some men forget this.
Understand clearly that all racing is rotten--as everything connected with
losing money must be. Out here, in addition to its inherent rottenness, it has
the merit of being two-thirds sham; looking pretty on paper only. Every one
knows every one else far too well for business purposes. How on earth can you
rack and harry and post a man for his losings, when you are fond of his wife,
and live in the same Station with him? He says, "on the Monday following," "I
can't settle just yet." "You say, "All right, old man," and think your self
lucky if you pull off nine hundred out of a two-thousand rupee debt. Any way
you look at it, Indian racing is immoral, and expensively immoral. Which is
much worse. If a man wants your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a
subscription-list, instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian
larrikin; a "brumby," with as much breed as the boy; a brace of chumars in
gold-laced caps; three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-
tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag.
Racing leads to the shroff quicker than anything else. But if you have no
conscience and no sentiments, and good hands, and some knowledge of pace, and
ten years' experience of horses, and several thousand rupees a month, I
believe that you can occasionally contrive to pay your shoeing- bills.
Did you ever know Shackles--b. w. g., 15.13.8--coarse, loose, mule-like ears--
barrel as long as a gate-post--tough as a telegraph-wire--and the queerest
brute that ever looked through a bridle? He was of no brand, being one of an
ear-nicked mob taken into the Bucephalus at 4l.-10s. a head to make up
freight, and sold raw and out of condition at Calcutta for Rs. 275. People who
lost money on him called him a "brumby;" but if ever any horse had Harpoon's
shoulders and The Gin's temper, Shackles was that horse. Two miles was his own
particular distance. He trained himself, ran himself, and rode himself; and,
if his jockey insulted him by giving him hints, he shut up at once and bucked
the boy off. He objected to dictation. Two or three of his owners did not
understand this, and lost money in consequence. At last he was bought by a man
who discovered that, if a race was to be won, Shackles, and Shackles only,
would win it in his own way, so long as his jockey sat still.
This man had a riding-boy called Brunt--a lad from Perth, West Australia--and
he taught Brunt, with a trainer's whip, the hardest thing a jock can learn--to
sit still, to sit still, and to keep on sitting still. When Brunt fairly
grasped this truth, Shackles devastated the country. No weight could stop him
at his own distance; and The fame of Shackles spread from Ajmir in the South,
to Chedputter in the North. There was no horse like Shackles, so long as he
was allowed to do his work in his own way. But he was beaten in the end; and
the story of his fall is enough to make angels weep.
At the lower end of the Chedputter racecourse, just before the turn into the
straight, the track passes close to a couple of old brick- mounds enclosing a
funnel-shaped hollow. The big end of the funnel is not six feet from the
railings on the off-side. The astounding peculiarity of the course is that, if
you stand at one particular place, about half a mile away, inside the course,
and speak at an ordinary pitch, your voice just hits the funnel of the brick-
mounds and makes a curious whining echo there. A man discovered this one
morning by accident while out training with a friend. He marked the place to
stand and speak from with a couple of bricks, and he kept his knowledge to
himself. EVERY peculiarity of a course is worth remembering in a country where
rats play the mischief with the elephant-litter, and Stewards build jumps to
suit their own stables.
This man ran a very fairish country-bred, a long, racking high mare with the
temper of a fiend, and the paces of an airy wandering seraph--a drifty, glidy
stretch. The mare was, as a delicate tribute to Mrs. Reiver, called "The Lady
Regula Baddun"--or for short, Regula Baddun.
Shackles' jockey, Brunt, was a quiet, well-behaved boy, but his nerves had
been shaken. He began his career by riding jump-races in Melbourne, where a
few Stewards want lynching, and was one of the jockeys who came through the
awful butchery--perhaps you will recollect it--of the Maribyrnong Plate. The
walls were colonial ramparts--logs of jarrak spiked into masonry--with wings
as strong as Church buttresses. Once in his stride, a horse had to jump or
fall. He couldn't run out. In the Maribyrnong Plate, twelve horses were jammed
at the second wall. Red Hat, leading, fell this side, and threw out The Glen,
and the ruck came up behind and the space between wing and wing was one
struggling, screaming, kicking shambles. Four jockeys were taken out dead;
three were very badly hurt, and Brunt was among the three. He told the story
of the Maribyrnong Plate sometimes; and when he described how Whalley on Red
Hat, said, as the mare fell under him:--"God ha' mercy, I'm done for!" and
how, next instant, Sithee There and White Otter had crushed the life out of
poor Whalley, and the dust hid a small hell of men and horses, no one
marvelled that Brunt had dropped jump-races and Australia together. Regula
Baddun's owner knew that story by heart. Brunt never varied it in the telling.
He had no education.
Shackles came to the Chedputter Autumn races one year, and his owner walked
about insulting the sportsmen of Chedputter generally, till they went to the
Honorary Secretary in a body and said:--"Appoint Handicappers, and arrange a
race which shall break Shackles and humble the pride of his owner." The
Districts rose against Shackles and sent up of their best; Ousel, who was
supposed to be able to do his mile in 1-53; Petard, the stud-bred, trained by
a cavalry regiment who knew how to train; Gringalet, the ewe-lamb of the 75th;
Bobolink, the pride of Peshawar; and many others.
They called that race The Broken-Link Handicap, because it was to smash
Shackles; and the Handicappers piled on the weights, and the Fund gave eight
hundred rupees, and the distance was "round the course for all horses."
Shackles' owner said:--"You can arrange the race with regard to Shackles only.
So long as you don't bury him under weight-cloths, I don't mind. Regula
Baddun's owner said:--"I throw in my mare to fret Ousel. Six furlongs is
Regula's distance, and she will then lie down and die. So also will Ousel, for
his jockey doesn't understand a waiting race." Now, this was a lie, for Regula
had been in work for two months at Dehra, and her chances were good, always
supposing that Shackles broke a blood-vessel--OR BRUNT MOVED ON HIM.
The plunging in the lotteries was fine. They filled eight thousand rupee
lotteries on the Broken Link Handicap, and the account in the Pioneer said
that "favoritism was divided." In plain English, the various contingents were
wild on their respective horses; for the Handicappers had done their work
well. The Honorary Secretary shouted himself hoarse through the din; and the
smoke of the cheroots was like the smoke, and the rattling of the dice-boxes
like the rattle of small-arm fire.
Ten horses started--very level--and Regula Baddun's owner cantered out on his
back to a place inside the circle of the course, where two bricks had been
thrown. He faced towards the brick-mounds at the lower end of the course and
waited.
The story of the running is in the Pioneer. At the end of the first mile,
Shackles crept out of the ruck, well on the outside, ready to get round the
turn, lay hold of the bit and spin up the straight before the others knew he
had got away. Brunt was sitting still, perfectly happy, listening to the
"drum, drum, drum" of the hoofs behind, and knowing that, in about twenty
strides, Shackles would draw one deep breath and go up the last half-mile like
the "Flying Dutchman." As Shackles went short to take the turn and came
abreast of the brick-mound, Brunt heard, above the noise of the wind in his
ears, a whining, wailing voice on the offside, saying:--"God ha' mercy, I'm
done for!" In one stride, Brunt saw the whole seething smash of the
Maribyrnong Plate before him, started in his saddle and gave a yell of terror.
The start brought the heels into Shackles' side, and the scream hurt Shackles'
feelings. He couldn't stop dead; but he put out his feet and slid along for
fifty yards, and then, very gravely and judicially, bucked off Brunt--a
shaking, terror-stricken lump, while Regula Baddun made a neck-and-neck race
with Bobolink up the straight, and won by a short head--Petard a bad third.
Shackles' owner, in the Stand, tried to think that his field-glasses had gone
wrong. Regula Baddun's owner, waiting by the two bricks, gave one deep sigh of
relief, and cantered back to the stand. He had won, in lotteries and bets,
about fifteen thousand.
It was a broken-link Handicap with a vengeance. It broke nearly all the men
concerned, and nearly broke the heart of Shackles' owner.
He went down to interview Brunt. The boy lay, livid and gasping with fright,
where he had tumbled off. The sin of losing the race never seemed to strike
him. All he knew was that Whalley had "called" him, that the "call" was a
warning; and, were he cut in two for it, he would never get up again. His
nerve had gone altogether, and he only asked his master to give him a good
thrashing, and let him go. He was fit for nothing, he said. He got his
dismissal, and crept up to the paddock, white as chalk, with blue lips, his
knees giving way under him. People said nasty things in the paddock; but Brunt
never heeded. He changed into tweeds, took his stick and went down the road,
still shaking with fright, and muttering over and over again:--"God ha' mercy,
I'm done for!" To the best of my knowledge and belief he spoke the truth.
So now you know how the Broken-Link Handicap was run and won. Of course you
don't believe it. You would credit anything about Russia's designs on India,
or the recommendations of the Currency Commission; but a little bit of sober
fact is more than you can stand!
BEYOND THE PALE.
"Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed. I went in search of love and
lost myself." Hindu Proverb.
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the
White go to the White and the Black to the Black.
Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things--neither
sudden, alien, nor unexpected.
This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of
decent every-day society, and paid for it heavily.
He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He
took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.
Deep away in the heart of the City, behind Jitha Megji's bustee, lies Amir
Nath's Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one grated window. At the
head of the Gully is a big cow-byre, and the walls on either side of the Gully
are without windows. Neither Suchet Singh nor Gaur Chand approved of their
women-folk looking into the world. If Durga Charan had been of their opinion,
he would have been a happier man today, and little Bisesa would have been able
to knead her own bread. Her room looked out through the grated window into the
narrow dark Gully where the sun never came and where the buffaloes wallowed in
the blue slime. She was a widow, about fifteen years old, and she prayed the
Gods, day and night, to send her a lover; for she did not approve of living
alone.
One day the man--Trejago his name was--came into Amir Nath's Gully on an
aimless wandering; and, after he had passed the buffaloes, stumbled over a big
heap of cattle food.
Then he saw that the Gully ended in a trap, and heard a little laugh from
behind the grated window. It was a pretty little laugh, and Trejago, knowing
that, for all practical purposes, the old Arabian Nights are good guides, went
forward to the window, and whispered that verse of "The Love Song of Har Dyal"
which begins:
Can a man stand upright in the face of the naked Sun;
or a Lover in the Presence of his Beloved?
If my feet fail me, O Heart of my Heart, am I to blame,
being blinded by the glimpse of your beauty?
There came the faint tchinks of a woman's bracelets from behind the grating,
and a little voice went on with the song at the fifth verse:
Alas! alas! Can the Moon tell the Lotus of her love when the
Gate of Heaven is shut and the clouds gather for the rains?
They have taken my Beloved, and driven her with the pack-horses
to the North.
There are iron chains on the feet that were set on my heart.
Call to the bowman to make ready--
The voice stopped suddenly, and Trejago walked out of Amir Nath's Gully,
wondering who in the world could have capped "The Love Song of Har Dyal" so
neatly.
Next morning, as he was driving to the office, an old woman threw a packet
into his dog-cart. In the packet was the half of a broken glass bangle, one
flower of the blood red dhak, a pinch of bhusa or cattle-food, and eleven
cardamoms. That packet was a letter--not a clumsy compromising letter, but an
innocent, unintelligible lover's epistle.
Trejago knew far too much about these things, as I have said. No Englishman
should be able to translate object-letters. But Trejago spread all the trifles
on the lid of his office-box and began to puzzle them out.
A broken glass-bangle stands for a Hindu widow all India over; because, when
her husband dies a woman's bracelets are broken on her wrists. Trejago saw the
meaning of the little bit of the glass.
The flower of the dhak means diversely "desire," "come," "write," or "danger,"
according to the other things with it. One cardamom means "jealousy;" but when
any article is duplicated in an object-letter, it loses its symbolic meaning
and stands merely for one of a number indicating time, or, if incense, curds,
or saffron be sent also, place. The message ran then:--"A widow dhak flower
and bhusa--at eleven o'clock." The pinch of bhusa enlightened Trejago. He saw-
-this kind of letter leaves much to instinctive knowledge--that the bhusa
referred to the big heap of cattle-food over which he had fallen in Amir
Nath's Gully, and that the message must come from the person behind the
grating; she being a widow. So the message ran then:--"A widow, in the Gully
in which is the heap of bhusa, desires you to come at eleven o'clock."
Trejago threw all the rubbish into the fireplace and laughed. He knew that men
in the East do not make love under windows at eleven in the forenoon, nor do
women fix appointments a week in advance.
So he went, that very night at eleven, into Amir Nath's Gully, clad in a
boorka, which cloaks a man as well as a woman. Directly the gongs in the City
made the hour, the little voice behind the grating took up "The Love Song of
Har Dyal" at the verse where the Panthan girl calls upon Har Dyal to return.
The song is really pretty in the Vernacular. In English you miss the wail of
it. It runs something like this:--
Alone upon the housetops, to the North
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
Below my feet the still bazar is laid
Far, far below the weary camels lie,--
The camels and the captives of thy raid,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
My father's wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father's house am I.--
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
As the song stopped, Trejago stepped up under the grating and whispered:--"I
am here."
Bisesa was good to look upon.
That night was the beginning of many strange things, and of a double life so
wild that Trejago today sometimes wonders if it were not all a dream. Bisesa
or her old handmaiden who had thrown the object-letter had detached the heavy
grating from the brick-work of the wall; so that the window slid inside,
leaving only a square of raw masonry, into which an active man might climb.
In the day-time, Trejago drove through his routine of office-work, or put on
his calling-clothes and called on the ladies of the Station; wondering how
long they would know him if they knew of poor little Bisesa. At night, when
all the City was still, came the walk under the evil-smelling boorka, the
patrol through Jitha Megji's bustee, the quick turn into Amir Nath's Gully
between the sleeping cattle and the dead walls, and then, last of all, Bisesa,
and the deep, even breathing of the old woman who slept outside the door of
the bare little room that Durga Charan allotted to his sister's daughter. Who
or what Durga Charan was, Trejago never inquired; and why in the world he was
not discovered and knifed never occurred to him till his madness was over, and
Bisesa . . . But this comes later.
Bisesa was an endless delight to Trejago. She was as ignorant as a bird; and
her distorted versions of the rumors from the outside world that had reached
her in her room, amused Trejago almost as much as her lisping attempts to
pronounce his name--"Christopher." The first syllable was always more than she
could manage, and she made funny little gestures with her rose-leaf hands, as
one throwing the name away, and then, kneeling before Trejago, asked him,
exactly as an Englishwoman would do, if he were sure he loved her. Trejago
swore that he loved her more than any one else in the world. Which was true.
After a month of this folly, the exigencies of his other life compelled
Trejago to be especially attentive to a lady of his acquaintance. You may take
it for a fact that anything of this kind is not only noticed and discussed by
a man's own race, but by some hundred and fifty natives as well. Trejago had
to walk with this lady and talk to her at the Band-stand, and once or twice to
drive with her; never for an instant dreaming that this would affect his
dearer out-of-the-way life. But the news flew, in the usual mysterious
fashion, from mouth to mouth, till Bisesa's duenna heard of it and told
Bisesa. The child was so troubled that she did the household work evilly, and
was beaten by Durga Charan's wife in consequence.
A week later, Bisesa taxed Trejago with the flirtation. She understood no
gradations and spoke openly. Trejago laughed and Bisesa stamped her little
feet--little feet, light as marigold flowers, that could lie in the palm of a
man's one hand.
Much that is written about "Oriental passion and impulsiveness" is exaggerated
and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true; and when an
Englishman finds that little, it is quite as startling as any passion in his
own proper life. Bisesa raged and stormed, and finally threatened to kill
herself if Trejago did not at once drop the alien Memsahib who had come
between them. Trejago tried to explain, and to show her that she did not
understand these things from a Western standpoint. Bisesa drew herself up, and
said simply:
"I do not. I know only this--it is not good that I should have made you dearer
than my own heart to me, Sahib. You are an Englishman.
I am only a black girl"--she was fairer than bar-gold in the Mint--"and the
widow of a black man."
Then she sobbed and said: "But on my soul and my Mother's soul, I love you.
There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me."
Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she seemed quite
unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save that all relations
between them should end. He was to go away at once. And he went. As he dropped
out at the window, she kissed his forehead twice, and he walked away
wondering.
A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa.
Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough, went down to
Amir Nath's Gully for the fifth time in the three weeks, hoping that his rap
at the sill of the shifting grating would be answered. He was not
disappointed.
There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir Nath's
Gully, and struck the grating, which was drawn away as he knocked. From the
black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been
cut off at the wrists, and the stumps were nearly healed.
Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in the
room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife, sword or spear--
thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed his body, but cut into one
of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from the wound for the
rest of his days.
The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside the
house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the blackness of
Amir Nath's Gully behind.
The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a madman
between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the river as the
dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home bareheaded.
What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair, told
everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured to tell,
whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of Bisesa--Trejago does
not know to this day. Something horrible had happened, and the thought of what
it must have been comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him
company till the morning. One special feature of the case is that he does not
know where lies the front of Durga Charan's house. It may open on to a
courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the
gates of Jitha Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell.
He cannot get Bisesa--poor little Bisesa--back again. He has lost her in the
City, where each man's house is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave; and
the grating that opens into Amir Nath's Gully has been walled up.
But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent sort of
man.
There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness, caused by a
riding-strain, in the right leg.
IN ERROR.
They burnt a corpse upon the sand--
The light shone out afar;
It guided home the plunging boats
That beat from Zanzibar.
Spirit of Fire, where'er Thy altars rise.
Thou art Light of Guidance to our eyes!
----Salsette Boat-Song.
There is hope for a man who gets publicly and riotously drunk more often that
he ought to do; but there is no hope for the man who drinks secretly and alone
in his own house--the man who is never seen to drink.
This is a rule; so there must be an exception to prove it.
Moriarty's case was that exception.
He was a Civil Engineer, and the Government, very kindly, put him quite by
himself in an out-district, with nobody but natives to talk to and a great
deal of work to do. He did his work well in the four years he was utterly
alone; but he picked up the vice of secret and solitary drinking, and came up
out of the wilderness more old and worn and haggard than the dead-alive life
had any right to make him.
You know the saying that a man who has been alone in the jungle for more than
a year is never quite sane all his life after. People credited Moriarty's
queerness of manner and moody ways to the solitude, and said it showed how
Government spoilt the futures of its best men. Moriarty had built himself the
plinth of a very god reputation in the bridge-dam-girder line. But he knew,
every night of the week, that he was taking steps to undermine that reputation
with L. L. L. and "Christopher" and little nips of liqueurs, and filth of that
kind. He had a sound constitution and a great brain, or else he would have
broken down and died like a sick camel in the district, as better men have
done before him.
Government ordered him to Simla after he had come out of the desert; and he
went up meaning to try for a post then vacant. That season, Mrs. Reiver--
perhaps you will remember her--was in the height of her power, and many men
lay under her yoke. Everything bad that could be said has already been said
about Mrs. Reiver, in another tale.
Moriarty was heavily-built and handsome, very quiet and nervously anxious to
please his neighbors when he wasn't sunk in a brown study. He started a good
deal at sudden noises or if spoken to without warning; and, when you watched
him drinking his glass of water at dinner, you could see the hand shake a
little. But all this was put down to nervousness, and the quiet, steady, "sip-
sip-sip, fill and sip-sip-sip, again," that went on in his own room when he
was by himself, was never known. Which was miraculous, seeing how everything
in a man's private life is public property out here.
Moriarty was drawn, not into Mrs. Reiver's set, because they were not his
sort, but into the power of Mrs. Reiver, and he fell down in front of her and
made a goddess of her. This was due to his coming fresh out of the jungle to a
big town. He could not scale things properly or see who was what.
Because Mrs. Reiver was cold and hard, he said she was stately and dignified.
Because she had no brains, and could not talk cleverly, he said she was
reserved and shy. Mrs. Reiver shy! Because she was unworthy of honor or
reverence from any one, he reverenced her from a distance and dowered her with
all the virtues in the Bible and most of those in Shakespeare.
This big, dark, abstracted man who was so nervous when a pony cantered behind
him, used to moon in the train of Mrs. Reiver, blushing with pleasure when she
threw a word or two his way. His admiration was strictly platonic: even other
women saw and admitted this. He did not move out in Simla, so he heard nothing
against his idol: which was satisfactory. Mrs. Reiver took no special notice
of him, beyond seeing that he was added to her list of admirers, and going for
a walk with him now and then, just to show that he was her property, claimable
as such. Moriarty must have done most of the talking, for Mrs. Reiver couldn't
talk much to a man of his stamp; and the little she said could not have been
profitable. What Moriarty believed in, as he had good reason to, was Mrs.
Reiver's influence over him, and, in that belief, set himself seriously to try
to do away with the vice that only he himself knew of.
His experiences while he was fighting with it must have been peculiar, but he
never described them. Sometimes he would hold off from everything except water
for a week. Then, on a rainy night, when no one had asked him out to dinner,
and there was a big fire in his room, and everything comfortable, he would sit
down and make a big night of it by adding little nip to little nip, planning
big schemes of reformation meanwhile, until he threw himself on his bed
hopelessly drunk. He suffered next morning.
One night, the big crash came. He was troubled in his own mind over his
attempts to make himself "worthy of the friendship" of Mrs. Reiver. The past
ten days had been very bad ones, and the end of it all was that he received
the arrears of two and three-quarter years of sipping in one attack of
delirium tremens of the subdued kind; beginning with suicidal depression,
going on to fits and starts and hysteria, and ending with downright raving. As
he sat in a chair in front of the fire, or walked up and down the room picking
a handkerchief to pieces, you heard what poor Moriarty really thought of Mrs.
Reiver, for he raved about her and his own fall for the most part; though he
ravelled some P. W. D. accounts into the same skein of thought. He talked, and
talked, and talked in a low dry whisper to himself, and there was no stopping
him. He seemed to know that there was something wrong, and twice tried to pull
himself together and confer rationally with the Doctor; but his mind ran out
of control at once, and he fell back to a whisper and the story of his
troubles. It is terrible to hear a big man babbling like a child of all that a
man usually locks up, and puts away in the deep of his heart. Moriarty read
out his very soul for the benefit of any one who was in the room between ten-
thirty that night and two-forty-five next morning.
From what he said, one gathered how immense an influence Mrs. Reiver held over
him, and how thoroughly he felt for his own lapse. His whisperings cannot, of
course, be put down here; but they were very instructive as showing the errors
of his estimates.
. . . . . . . . .
When the trouble was over, and his few acquaintances were pitying him for the
bad attack of jungle-fever that had so pulled him down, Moriarty swore a big
oath to himself and went abroad again with Mrs. Reiver till the end of the
season, adoring her in a quiet and deferential way as an angel from heaven.
Later on he took to riding--not hacking, but honest riding--which was good
proof that he was improving, and you could slam doors behind him without his
jumping to his feet with a gasp. That, again, was hopeful.
How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning, nobody knows. He
certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a man who has drank
heavily can do. He took his peg and wine at dinner, but he never drank alone,
and never let what he drank have the least hold on him.
Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how the
"influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well" had saved him. When
the man--startled at anything good being laid to Mrs. Reiver's door--laughed,
it cost him Moriarty's friendship.
Moriarty, who is married now to a woman ten thousand times better than Mrs.
Reiver--a woman who believes that there is no man on earth as good and clever
as her husband--will go down to his grave vowing and protesting that Mrs.
Reiver saved him from ruin in both worlds.
That she knew anything of Moriarty's weakness nobody believed for a moment.
That she would have cut him dead, thrown him over, and acquainted all her
friends with her discovery, if she had known of it, nobody who knew her
doubted for an instant.
Moriarty thought her something she never was, and in that belief saved
himself. Which was just as good as though she had been everything that he had
imagined.
But the question is, what claim will Mrs. Reiver have to the credit of
Moriarty's salvation, when her day of reckoning comes?
A BANK FRAUD.
He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forebore to pay;
He struck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.
Then, 'twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.
--THE MESS ROOM.
If Reggie Burke were in India now, he would resent this tale being told; but
as he is in Hong-Kong and won't see it, the telling is safe. He was the man
who worked the big fraud on the Sind and Sialkote Bank. He was manager of an
up-country Branch, and a sound practical man with a large experience of native
loan and insurance work. He could combine the frivolities of ordinary life
with his work, and yet do well. Reggie Burke rode anything that would let him
get up, danced as neatly as he rode, and was wanted for every sort of
amusement in the Station.
As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their surprise, there
were two Burkes, both very much at your service.
"Reggie Burke," between four and ten, ready for anything from a hot-weather
gymkhana to a riding-picnic; and, between ten and four, "Mr. Reginald Burke,
Manager of the Sind and Sialkote Branch Bank." You might play polo with him
one afternoon and hear him express his opinions when a man crossed; and you
might call on him next morning to raise a two-thousand rupee loan on a five
hundred pound insurance-policy, eighty pounds paid in premiums. He would
recognize you, but you would have some trouble in recognizing him.
The Directors of the Bank--it had its headquarters in Calcutta and its General
Manager's word carried weight with the Government--picked their men well. They
had tested Reggie up to a fairly severe breaking-strain. They trusted him just
as much as Directors ever trust Managers. You must see for yourself whether
their trust was misplaced.
Reggie's Branch was in a big Station, and worked with the usual staff--one
Manager, one Accountant, both English, a Cashier, and a horde of native
clerks; besides the Police patrol at nights outside.
The bulk of its work, for it was in a thriving district, was hoondi and
accommodation of all kinds. A fool has no grip of this sort of business; and a
clever man who does not go about among his clients, and know more than a
little of their affairs, is worse than a fool.
Reggie was young-looking, clean-shaved, with a twinkle in his eye, and a head
that nothing short of a gallon of the Gunners' Madeira could make any
impression on.
One day, at a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors had shifted
on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was
perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a MOST curious animal--a
long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that
blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the
mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven years,
to a Cashier's position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay
among the factories of the North. Perhaps he would have done better on the
Bombay side, where they are happy with one-half per cent. profits, and money
is cheap. He was useless for Upper India and a wheat Province, where a man
wants a large head and a touch of imagination if he is to turn out a
satisfactory balance-sheet.
He was wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to the country,
had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from Home work. Like
most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his nature; and, somehow
or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms of his letter of
engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen him on account of his
special and brilliant talents, and that they set great store by him. This
notion grew and crystallized; thus adding to his natural North-country
conceit.
Further, he was delicate, suffered from some trouble in his chest, and was
short in his temper.
You will admit that Reggie had reason to call his new Accountant a Natural
Curiosity. The two men failed to hit it off at all. Riley considered Reggie a
wild, feather-headed idiot, given to Heaven only knew what dissipation in low
places called "Messes," and totally unfit for the serious and solemn vocation
of banking. He could never get over Reggie's look of youth and "you-be-damned"
air; and he couldn't understand Reggie's friends--clean-built, careless men in
the Army--who rode over to big Sunday breakfasts at the Bank, and told sultry
stories till Riley got up and left the room. Riley was always showing Reggie
how the business ought to be conducted, and Reggie had more than once to
remind him that seven years' limited experience between Huddersfield and
Beverly did not qualify a man to steer a big up-country business. Then Riley
sulked and referred to himself as a pillar of the Bank and a cherished friend
of the Directors, and Reggie tore his hair. If a man's English subordinates
fail him in this country, he comes to a hard time indeed, for native help has
strict limitations. In the winter Riley went sick for weeks at a time with his
lung complaint, and this threw more work on Reggie. But he preferred it to the
everlasting friction when Riley was well.
One of the Travelling Inspectors of the Bank discovered these collapses and
reported them to the Directors. Now Riley had been foisted on the Bank by an
M. P., who wanted the support of Riley's father, who, again, was anxious to
get his son out to a warmer climate because of those lungs. The M. P. had an
interest in the Bank; but one of the Directors wanted to advance a nominee of
his own; and, after Riley's father had died, he made the rest of the Board see
that an Accountant who was sick for half the year, had better give place to a
healthy man. If Riley had known the real story of his appointment, he might
have behaved better; but knowing nothing, his stretches of sickness alternated
with restless, persistent, meddling irritation of Reggie, and all the hundred
ways in which conceit in a subordinate situation can find play. Reggie used to
call him striking and hair-curling names behind his back as a relief to his
own feelings; but he never abused him to his face, because he said: "Riley is
such a frail beast that half of his loathsome conceit is due to pains in the
chest."
Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The doctor punched him and
thumped him, and told him he would be better before long. Then the doctor went
to Reggie and said:--"Do you know how sick your Accountant is?" "No!" said
Reggie--"The worse the better, confound him! He's a clacking nuisance when
he's well. I'll let you take away the Bank Safe if you can drug him silent for
this hot-weather."
But the doctor did not laugh--"Man, I'm not joking," he said. "I'll give him
another three months in his bed and a week or so more to die in. On my honor
and reputation that's all the grace he has in this world. Consumption has hold
of him to the marrow."
Reggie's face changed at once into the face of "Mr. Reginald Burke," and he
answered:--"What can I do?"
"Nothing," said the doctor. "For all practical purposes the man is dead
already. Keep him quiet and cheerful and tell him he's going to recover.
That's all. I'll look after him to the end, of course."
The doctor went away, and Reggie sat down to open the evening mail.
His first letter was one from the Directors, intimating for his information
that Mr. Riley was to resign, under a month's notice, by the terms of his
agreement, telling Reggie that their letter to Riley would follow and advising
Reggie of the coming of a new Accountant, a man whom Reggie knew and liked.
Reggie lit a cheroot, and, before he had finished smoking, he had sketched the
outline of a fraud. He put away--"burked"--the Directors letter, and went in
to talk to Riley, who was as ungracious as usual, and fretting himself over
the way the bank would run during his illness. He never thought of the extra
work on Reggie's shoulders, but solely of the damage to his own prospects of
advancement. Then Reggie assured him that everything would be well, and that
he, Reggie, would confer with Riley daily on the management of the Bank. Riley
was a little soothed, but he hinted in as many words that he did not think
much of Reggie's business capacity.
Reggie was humble. And he had letters in his desk from the Directors that a
Gilbarte or a Hardie might have been proud of!
The days passed in the big darkened house, and the Directors' letter of
dismissal to Riley came and was put away by Reggie, who, every evening,
brought the books to Riley's room, and showed him what had been going forward,
while Riley snarled. Reggie did his best to make statements pleasing to Riley,
but the Accountant was sure that the Bank was going to rack and ruin without
him. In June, as the lying in bed told on his spirit, he asked whether his
absence had been noted by the Directors, and Reggie said that they had written
most sympathetic letters, hoping that he would be able to resume his valuable
services before long. He showed Riley the letters: and Riley said that the
Directors ought to have written to him direct.
A few days later, Reggie opened Riley's mail in the half-light of the room,
and gave him the sheet--not the envelope--of a letter to Riley from the
Directors. Riley said he would thank Reggie not to interfere with his private
papers, specially as Reggie knew he was too weak to open his own letters.
Reggie apologized.
Then Riley's mood changed, and he lectured Reggie on his evil ways: his horses
and his bad friends. "Of course, lying here on my back, Mr. Burke, I can't
keep you straight; but when I'm well, I DO hope you'll pay some heed to my
words." Reggie, who had dropped polo, and dinners, and tennis, and all to
attend to Riley, said that he was penitent and settled Riley's head on the
pillow and heard him fret and contradict in hard, dry, hacking whispers,
without a sign of impatience. This at the end of a heavy day's office work,
doing double duty, in the latter half of June.
When the new Accountant came, Reggie told him the facts of the case, and
announced to Riley that he had a guest staying with him. Riley said that he
might have had more consideration than to entertain his "doubtful friends" at
such a time. Reggie made Carron, the new Accountant, sleep at the Club in
consequence. Carron's arrival took some of the heavy work off his shoulders,
and he had time to attend to Riley's exactions--to explain, soothe, invent,
and settle and resettle the poor wretch in bed, and to forge complimentary
letters from Calcutta. At the end of the first month, Riley wished to send
some money home to his mother. Reggie sent the draft. At the end of the second
month, Riley's salary came in just the same. Reggie paid it out of his own
pocket; and, with it, wrote Riley a beautiful letter from the Directors.
Riley was very ill indeed, but the flame of his life burnt unsteadily. Now and
then he would be cheerful and confident about the future, sketching plans for
going Home and seeing his mother.
Reggie listened patiently when the office work was over, and encouraged him.
At other times Riley insisted on Reggie's reading the Bible and grim "Methody"
tracts to him. Out of these tracts he pointed morals directed at his Manager.
But he always found time to worry Reggie about the working of the Bank, and to
show him where the weak points lay.
This in-door, sick-room life and constant strains wore Reggie down a good
deal, and shook his nerves, and lowered his billiard-play by forty points. But
the business of the Bank, and the business of the sick-room, had to go on,
though the glass was 116 degrees in the shade.
At the end of the third month, Riley was sinking fast, and had begun to
realize that he was very sick. But the conceit that made him worry Reggie,
kept him from believing the worst. "He wants some sort of mental stimulant if
he is to drag on," said the doctor.
"Keep him interested in life if you care about his living." So Riley, contrary
to all the laws of business and the finance, received a 25-per-cent, rise of
salary from the Directors. The "mental stimulant" succeeded beautifully. Riley
was happy and cheerful, and, as is often the case in consumption, healthiest
in mind when the body was weakest. He lingered for a full month, snarling and
fretting about the Bank, talking of the future, hearing the Bible read,
lecturing Reggie on sin, and wondering when he would be able to move abroad.
But at the end of September, one mercilessly hot evening, he rose up in his
bed with a little gasp, and said quickly to Reggie:--"Mr. Burke, I am going to
die. I know it in myself. My chest is all hollow inside, and there's nothing
to breathe with. To the best of my knowledge I have done nowt"--he was
returning to the talk of his boyhood--"to lie heavy on my conscience. God be
thanked, I have been preserved from the grosser forms of sin; and I counsel
YOU, Mr. Burke . . . ."
Here his voice died down, and Reggie stooped over him.
"Send my salary for September to my mother. . . . done great things with the
Bank if I had been spared . . . . mistaken policy . . . . no fault of mine."
Then he turned his face to the wall and died.
Reggie drew the sheet over Its face, and went out into the verandah, with his
last "mental stimulant"--a letter of condolence and sympathy from the
Directors--unused in his pocket.
"If I'd been only ten minutes earlier," thought Reggie, "I might have
heartened him up to pull through another day."
TODS' AMENDMENT.
The World hath set its heavy yoke
Upon the old white-bearded folk
Who strive to please the King.
God's mercy is upon the young,
God's wisdom in the baby tongue
That fears not anything.
--The Parable of Chajju Bhagat.
Now Tods' Mamma was a singularly charming woman, and every one in Simla knew
Tods. Most men had saved him from death on occasions.
He was beyond his ayah's control altogether, and perilled his life daily to
find out what would happen if you pulled a Mountain Battery mule's tail. He
was an utterly fearless young Pagan, about six years old, and the only baby
who ever broke the holy calm of the supreme Legislative Council.
It happened this way: Tods' pet kid got loose, and fled up the hill, off the
Boileaugunge Road, Tods after it, until it burst into the Viceregal Lodge
lawn, then attached to "Peterhoff." The Council were sitting at the time, and
the windows were open because it was warm. The Red Lancer in the porch told
Tods to go away; but Tods knew the Red Lancer and most of the Members of
Council personally.
Moreover, he had firm hold of the kid's collar, and was being dragged all
across the flower-beds. "Give my salaam to the long Councillor Sahib, and ask
him to help me take Moti back!" gasped Tods. The Council heard the noise
through the open windows; and, after an interval, was seen the shocking
spectacle of a Legal Member and a Lieutenant-Governor helping, under the
direct patronage of a Commander-in-Chief and a Viceroy, one small and very
dirty boy in a sailor's suit and a tangle of brown hair, to coerce a lively
and rebellious kid. They headed it off down the path to the Mall, and Tods
went home in triumph and told his Mamma that ALL the Councillor Sahibs had
been helping him to catch Moti. Whereat his Mamma smacked Tods for interfering
with the administration of the Empire; but Tods met the Legal Member the next
day, and told him in confidence that if the Legal Member ever wanted to catch
a goat, he, Tods, would give him all the help in his power. "Thank you, Tods,"
said the Legal Member.
Tods was the idol of some eighty jhampanis, and half as many saises.
He saluted them all as "O Brother." It never entered his head that any living
human being could disobey his orders; and he was the buffer between the
servants and his Mamma's wrath. The working of that household turned on Tods,
who was adored by every one from the dhoby to the dog-boy. Even Futteh Khan,
the villainous loafer khit from Mussoorie, shirked risking Tods' displeasure
for fear his co-mates should look down on him.
So Tods had honor in the land from Boileaugunge to Chota Simla, and ruled
justly according to his lights. Of course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also
mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held
grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for
his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter
truths of life; the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread
and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the
vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods MUST
go home next hot weather.
Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme Legislature were
hacking out a Bill, for the Sub-Montane Tracts, a revision of the then Act,
smaller than the Punjab Land Bill, but affecting a few hundred thousand people
none the less. The Legal Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered, and
amended that Bill, till it looked beautiful on paper. Then the Council began
to settle what they called the "minor details." As if any Englishman
legislating for natives knows enough to know which are the minor and which are
the major points, from the native point of view, of any measure! That Bill was
a triumph of "safe-guarding the interests of the tenant." One clause provided
that land should not be leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch;
because, if the landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he
would squeeze the very life out of him. The notion was to keep up a stream of
independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and ethnologically and
politically the notion was correct. The only drawback was that it was
altogether wrong. A native's life in India implies the life of his son.
Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one generation at a time. You must
consider the next from the native point of view. Curiously enough, the native
now and then, and in Northern India more particularly, hates being over-
protected against himself. There was a Naga village once, where they lived on
dead AND buried Commissariat mules . . . . But that is another story.
For many reasons, to be explained later, the people concerned objected to the
Bill. The Native Member in Council knew as much about Punjabis as he knew
about Charing Cross. He had said in Calcutta that "the Bill was entirely in
accord with the desires of that large and important class, the cultivators;"
and so on, and so on. The Legal Member's knowledge of natives was limited to
English-speaking Durbaris, and his own red chaprassis, the Sub-Montane Tracts
concerned no one in particular, the Deputy Commissioners were a good deal too
driven to make representations, and the measure was one which dealt with small
landholders only. Nevertheless, the Legal Member prayed that it might be
correct, for he was a nervously conscientious man. He did not know that no man
can tell what natives think unless he mixes with them with the varnish off.
And not always then. But he did the best he knew. And the measure came up to
the Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods patrolled the Burra
Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with the monkey belonging to
Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child listens to all the stray talk
about this new freak of the Lat Sahib's.
One day there was a dinner-party, at the house of Tods' Mamma, and the Legal
Member came. Tods was in bed, but he kept awake till he heard the bursts of
laughter from the men over the coffee. Then he paddled out in his little red
flannel dressing-gown and his night-suit, and took refuge by the side of his
father, knowing that he would not be sent back. "See the miseries of having a
family!" said Tods' father, giving Tods three prunes, some water in a glass
that had been used for claret, and telling him to sit still. Tods sucked the
prunes slowly, knowing that he would have to go when they were finished, and
sipped the pink water like a man of the world, as he listened to the
conversation. Presently, the Legal Member, talking "shop," to the Head of a
Department, mentioned his Bill by its full name--"The Sub-Montane Tracts
Ryotwari Revised Enactment." Tods caught the one native word, and lifting up
his small voice said:--"Oh, I know ALL about that! Has it been murramutted
yet, Councillor Sahib?"
"How much?" said the Legal Member.
"Murramutted--mended.--Put theek, you know--made nice to please Ditta Mull!"
The Legal Member left his place and moved up next to Tods.
"What do you know about Ryotwari, little man?" he said.
"I'm not a little man, I'm Tods, and I know ALL about it. Ditta Mull, and
Choga Lall, and Amir Nath, and--oh, lakhs of my friends tell me about it in
the bazars when I talk to them."
"Oh, they do--do they? What do they say, Tods?"
Tods tucked his feet under his red flannel dressing-gown and said:--"I must
fink."
The Legal Member waited patiently. Then Tods, with infinite compassion:
"You don't speak my talk, do you, Councillor Sahib?"
"No; I am sorry to say I do not," said the Legal' Member.
"Very well," said Tods. "I must fink in English."
He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly,
translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many Anglo-Indian
children do. You must remember that the Legal Member helped him on by
questions when he halted, for Tods was not equal to the sustained flight of
oratory that follows.
"Ditta Mull says:--'This thing is the talk of a child, and was made up by
fools.' But I don't think you are a fool, Councillor Sahib," said Tods,
hastily. "You caught my goat. This is what Ditta Mull says:--'I am not a fool,
and why should the Sirkar say I am a child? I can see if the land is good and
if the landlord is good. If I am a fool, the sin is upon my own head. For five
years I take my ground for which I have saved money, and a wife I take too, and
a little son is born.' Ditta Mull has one daughter now, but he SAYS he will
have a son, soon. And he says: 'At the end of five years, by this new
bundobust, I must go. If I do not go, I must get fresh seals and takkus-stamps
on the papers, perhaps in the middle of the harvest, and to go to the law-
courts once is wisdom, but to go twice is Jehannum.' That is QUITE true,"
explained Tods, gravely. "All my friends say so. And Ditta Mull says:--'Always
fresh takkus and paying money to vakils and chaprassis and law-courts every
five years or else the landlord makes me go. Why do I want to go? Am I fool? If
I am a fool and do not know, after forty years, good land when I see it, let me
die! But if the new bundobust says for FIFTEEN years, then it is good and wise.
My little son is a man, and I am burnt, and he takes the ground or another
ground, paying only once for the takkus-stamps on the papers, and his little
son is born, and at the end of fifteen years is a man too. But what profit is
there in five years and fresh papers? Nothing but dikh, trouble, dikh. We are
not young men who take these lands, but old ones--not jais, but tradesmen with
a little money--and for fifteen years we shall have peace. Nor are we children
that the Sirkar should treat us so."
Here Tods stopped short, for the whole table were listening. The Legal Member
said to Tods: "Is that all?"
"All I can remember," said Tods. "But you should see Ditta Mull's big monkey.
It's just like a Councillor Sahib."
"Tods! Go to bed," said his father.
Tods gathered up his dressing-gown tail and departed.
The Legal Member brought his hand down on the table with a crash--"By Jove!"
said the Legal Member, "I believe the boy is right. The short tenure IS the
weak point."
He left early, thinking over what Tods had said. Now, it was obviously
impossible for the Legal Member to play with a bunnia's monkey, by way of
getting understanding; but he did better. He made inquiries, always bearing in
mind the fact that the real native--not the hybrid, University-trained mule--is
as timid as a colt, and, little by little, he coaxed some of the men whom the
measure concerned most intimately to give in their views, which squared very
closely with Tods' evidence.
So the Bill was amended in that clause; and the Legal Member was filled with an
uneasy suspicion that Native Members represent very little except the Orders
they carry on their bosoms. But he put the thought from him as illiberal. He
was a most Liberal Man.
After a time the news spread through the bazars that Tods had got the Bill
recast in the tenure clause, and if Tods' Mamma had not interfered, Tods would
have made himself sick on the baskets of fruit and pistachio nuts and Cabuli
grapes and almonds that crowded the verandah. Till he went Home, Tods ranked
some few degrees before the Viceroy in popular estimation. But for the little
life of him Tods could not understand why.
In the Legal Member's private-paper-box still lies the rough draft of the Sub-
Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment; and, opposite the twenty-second
clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words
"Tods' Amendment."
IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.
"Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting it--cur to the bone!"
"Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
Maybe they used him too much at the start;
Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart."
--Life's Handicap.
When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the Senior
Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the jest left out.
This is that tale:
Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by landlady's
daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so nearly of his own
caste that only a woman could have said she was just the least little bit in
the world below it. This happened a month before he came out to India, and five
days after his one-and-twentieth birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years
older than Dicky in the things of this world, that is to say--and, for the
time, twice as foolish as he.
Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally easy than
marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than fifty shillings,
and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After the declarations of
residence have been put in, four minutes will cover the rest of the
proceedings--fees, attestation, and all. Then the Registrar slides the
blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with his pen between his teeth:--
"Now you're man and wife;" and the couple walk out into the street, feeling as
if something were horribly illegal somewhere.
But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just as thoroughly as
the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the altar-rails, with the
bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" lifting
the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt kidnapped, and he considered it
vastly fine, for he had received an appointment in India which carried a
magnificent salary from the Home point of view. The marriage was to be kept
secret for a year. Then Mrs. Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life
was to be a glorious golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the
Addison Road Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and
Dicky steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings a
week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near the
Knightsbridge Barracks.
But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where "men" of twenty-one
were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive. The salary that
loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far. Particularly when Dicky
divided it by two, and remitted more than the fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier
Square. One hundred and thirty-five rupees out of three hundred and thirty is
not much to live on; but it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt could exist
forever on the 20 pounds held back by Dicky, from his outfit allowance. Dicky
saw this, and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be
paid, twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you
add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a new
life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and the
necessity for grappling with strange work--which, properly speaking, should
take up a boy's undivided attention--you will see that Dicky started
handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did not guess the
full beauty of his future.
As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his flesh.
First would come letters--big, crossed, seven sheet letters--from his wife,
telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven upon earth would be
their property when they met.
Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the door of
his bare little room, and tell him to come out and look at a pony--the very
thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had to explain this. Dicky
could not afford living in the chummery, modest as it was. He had to explain
this before he moved to a single room next the office where he worked all day.
He kept house on a green oil-cloth table-cover, one chair, one charpoy, one
photograph, one tooth-glass, very strong and thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna
filter, and messing by contract at thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item
was extortion. He had no punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but
he slept on the roof of the office with all his wife's letters under his
pillow. Now and again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a punkah and
an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing a boy
who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler, and who lived in
such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not subscribe to any amusement, so he found
no amusement except the pleasure of turning over his Bank-book and reading what
it said about "loans on approved security." That cost nothing. He remitted
through a Bombay Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private
affairs.
Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife--and for
another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly and would require
more money.
About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear that
besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to look to.
What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided for? The thought
used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the roof, till the shaking
of his heart made him think that he was going to die then and there of heart-
disease.
Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is a strong
man's trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove poor punkah-less,
perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one about it.
A certain amount of "screw" is as necessary for a man as for a billiard-ball.
It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed money badly, and he worked
for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men who owned him knew that a boy can
live very comfortably on a certain income--pay in India is a matter of age, not
merit, you see, and if their particular boy wished to work like two boys,
Business forbid that they should stop him! But Business forbid that they should
give him an increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age! So Dicky
won certain rises of salary--ample for a boy--not enough for a wife and child--
certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he and Mrs. Hatt
had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this he was forced to be
content.
Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the crushing
Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew querulous. "Why
wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he had a salary--a fine
salary--and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself in India. But would he--
could he--make the next draft a little more elastic?" Here followed a list of
baby's kit, as long as a Parsee's bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his
wife and the little son he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy is
entitled to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half- man letters,
saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little wife wait
yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she approved of money,
objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters
that Dicky didn't understand. How could he, poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another youngster who
had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that matrimony would not only
ruin his further chances of advancement, but would lose him his present
appointment--came the news that the baby, his own little, little son, had died,
and, behind this, forty lines of an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death
might have been averted if certain things, all costing money, had been done, or
if the mother and the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky's
naked heart; but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no
sign of trouble.
How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept alight to
force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the seven-hundred-
rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living unchanged, except
when he launched into a new filter.
There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his remittances, and
the knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the boy more, perhaps, than it
would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the enduring strain of his daily
life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved of his thrift and his fashion of
denying himself everything pleasant, reminded him of the old saw that says:
"If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart."
And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man is
permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of his balanced
Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.
But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived a letter
from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if Dicky had only
known it--and the burden of that letter was "gone with a handsomer man than
you." It was a rather curious production, without stops, something like this:--
"She was not going to wait forever and the baby was dead and Dicky was only a
boy and he would never set eyes on her again and why hadn't he waved his
handkerchief to her when he left Gravesend and God was her judge she was a
wicked woman but Dicky was worse enjoying himself in India and this other man
loved the ground she trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would
never forgive Dicky; and there was no address to write to."
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky discovered exactly
how an injured husband feels--again, not at all the knowledge to which a boy is
entitled--for his mind went back to his wife as he remembered her in the
thirty-shilling "suite" in Montpelier Square, when the dawn of his last morning
in England was breaking, and she was crying in the bed. Whereat he rolled about
on his bed and bit his fingers. He never stopped to think whether, if he had
met Mrs. Hatt after those two years, he would have discovered that he and she
had grown quite different and new persons. This, theoretically, he ought to
have done. He spent the night after the English Mail came in rather severe
pain.
Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that he had missed
the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had tasted all the sorrow in life
before three-and-twenty. His Honor was gone--that was the man; and now he, too,
would go to the Devil--that was the boy in him. So he put his head down on the
green oil-cloth table-cover, and wept before resigning his post, and all it
offered.
But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to reconsider
himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some telegraphings, said that
it was a most unusual step, but, in view of the ability that Mr. Hatt had
displayed at such and such a time, at such and such junctures, he was in a
position to offer him an infinitely superior post--first on probation, and
later, in the natural course of things, on confirmation. "And how much does the
post carry?" said Dicky. "Six hundred and fifty rupees," said the Head slowly,
expecting to see the young man sink with gratitude and joy.
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to have saved the
wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of assured and open marriage,
came then. Dicky burst into a roar of laughter--laughter he could not check--
nasty, jangling merriment that seemed as if it would go on forever. When he had
recovered himself he said, quite seriously:--"I'm tired of work. I'm an old man
now. It's about time I retired. And I will."
"The boy's mad!" said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the question.
PIG.
Go, stalk the red deer o'er the heather
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man,--
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin,--the hunting of Man.
--The Old Shikarri.
I believe the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a twist in his
temper, whom Pinecoffin sold to Nafferton and by whom Nafferton was nearly
slain. There may have been other causes of offence; the horse was the official
stalking-horse. Nafferton was very angry; but Pinecoffin laughed and said that
he had never guaranteed the beast's manners. Nafferton laughed, too, though he
vowed that he would write off his fall against Pinecoffin if he waited five
years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond Skipton will forgive an injury when the
Strid lets a man live; but a South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You
can see from their names that Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffin.
He was a peculiar man, and his notions of humor were cruel. He taught me a new
and fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffin from Mithankot to
Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad up and across the Punjab, a large
province and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no intention of
allowing Assistant Commissioners to "sell him pups," in the shape of ramping,
screaming countrybreds, without making their lives a burden to them.
Most Assistant Commissioners develop a bent for some special work after their
first hot weather in the country. The boys with digestions hope to write their
names large on the Frontier and struggle for dreary places like Bannu and
Kohat. The bilious ones climb into the Secretariat. Which is very bad for the
liver.
Others are bitten with a mania for District work, Ghuznivide coins or Persian
poetry; while some, who come of farmers' stock, find that the smell of the
Earth after the Rains gets into their blood, and calls them to "develop the
resources of the Province." These men are enthusiasts. Pinecoffin belonged to
their class. He knew a great many facts bearing on the cost of bullocks and
temporary wells, and opium-scrapers, and what happens if you burn too much
rubbish on a field, in the hope of enriching used-up soil. All the Pinecoffins
come of a landholding breed, and so the land only took back her own again.
Unfortunately--most unfortunately for Pinecoffin--he was a Civilian, as well as
a farmer. Nafferton watched him, and thought about the horse. Nafferton said:--
"See me chase that boy till he drops!" I said:--"You can't get your knife into
an Assistant Commissioner." Nafferton told me that I did not understand the
administration of the Province.
Our Government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural and general
information side, and will supply a moderately respectable man with all sorts
of "economic statistics," if he speaks to it prettily. For instance, you are
interested in gold-washing in the sands of the Sutlej. You pull the string, and
find that it wakes up half a dozen Departments, and finally communicates, say,
with a friend of yours in the Telegraph, who once wrote some notes on the
customs of the gold-washers when he was on construction-work in their part of
the Empire. He may or may not be pleased at being ordered to write out
everything he knows for your benefit. This depends on his temperament. The
bigger man you are, the more information and the greater trouble can you raise.
Nafferton was not a big man; but he had the reputation of being very earnest."
An "earnest" man can do much with a Government. There was an earnest man who
once nearly wrecked . . . but all India knows THAT story. I am not sure what
real "earnestness" is. A very fair imitation can be manufactured by neglecting
to dress decently, by mooning about in a dreamy, misty sort of way, by taking
office-work home after staying in office till seven, and by receiving crowds of
native gentlemen on Sundays. That is one sort of "earnestness."
Nafferton cast about for a peg whereon to hang his earnestness, and for a
string that would communicate with Pinecoffin. He found both.
They were Pig. Nafferton became an earnest inquirer after Pig. He informed the
Government that he had a scheme whereby a very large percentage of the British
Army in India could be fed, at a very large saving, on Pig. Then he hinted that
Pinecoffin might supply him with the "varied information necessary to the
proper inception of the scheme." So the Government wrote on the back of the
letter:--"Instruct Mr. Pinecoffin to furnish Mr. Nafferton with any information
in his power." Government is very prone to writing things on the backs of
letters which, later, lead to trouble and confusion.
Nafferton had not the faintest interest in Pig, but he knew that Pinecoffin
would flounce into the trap. Pinecoffin was delighted at being consulted about
Pig. The Indian Pig is not exactly an important factor in agricultural life;
but Nafferton explained to Pinecoffin that there was room for improvement, and
corresponded direct with that young man.
You may think that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all depends how
you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and wishing to do things
thoroughly, began with an essay on the Primitive Pig, the Mythology of the Pig,
and the Dravidian Pig.
Nafferton filed that information--twenty-seven foolscap sheets--and wanted to
know about the distribution of the Pig in the Punjab, and how it stood the
Plains in the hot weather. From this point onwards, remember that I am giving
you only the barest outlines of the affair--the guy-ropes, as it were, of the
web that Nafferton spun round Pinecoffin.
Pinecoffin made a colored Pig-population map, and collected observations on the
comparative longevity of the Pig (a) in the sub-montane tracts of the
Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.
Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after Pig. This
started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew from Pinecoffin long
tables showing the proportion per thousand of the caste in the Derajat.
Nafferton filed that bundle, and explained that the figures which he wanted
referred to the Cis-Sutlej states, where he understood that Pigs were very fine
and large, and where he proposed to start a Piggery. By this time, Government
had quite forgotten their instructions to Mr. Pinecoffin.
They were like the gentlemen, in Keats' poem, who turned well-oiled wheels to
skin other people. But Pinecoffin was just entering into the spirit of the Pig-
hunt, as Nafferton well knew he would do. He had a fair amount of work of his
own to clear away; but he sat up of nights reducing Pig to five places of
decimals for the honor of his Service. He was not going to appear ignorant of
so easy a subject as Pig.
Then Government sent him on special duty to Kohat, to "inquire into" the big-
seven-foot, iron-shod spades of that District. People had been killing each
other with those peaceful tools; and Government wished to know "whether a
modified form of agricultural implement could not, tentatively and as a
temporary measure, be introduced among the agricultural population without
needlessly or unduly exasperating the existing religious sentiments of the
peasantry."
Between those spades and Nafferton's Pig, Pinecoffin was rather heavily
burdened.
Nafferton now began to take up "(a) The food-supply of the indigenous Pig,
with a view to the improvement of its capacities as a flesh-former. (b) The
acclimatization of the exotic Pig, maintaining its distinctive peculiarities."
Pinecoffin replied exhaustively that the exotic Pig would become merged in the
indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding statistics to prove this.
The side-issue was debated, at great length on Pinecoffin's side, till
Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong, and moved the previous question.
When Pinecoffin had quite written himself out about flesh-formers, and fibrins,
and glucose and the nitrogenous constituents of maize and lucerne, Nafferton
raised the question of expense. By this time Pinecoffin, who had been
transferred from Kohat, had developed a Pig theory of his own, which he stated
in thirty-three folio pages--all carefully filed by Nafferton. Who asked for
more.
These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin's interest in the potential
Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own views. But Nafferton
bombarded him with letters on "the Imperial aspect of the scheme, as tending to
officialize the sale of pork, and thereby calculated to give offence to the
Mahomedan population of Upper India." He guessed that Pinecoffin would want
some broad, free-hand work after his niggling, stippling, decimal details.
Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly style, and
proved that no "popular ebullition of excitement was to be apprehended."
Nafferton said that there was nothing like Civilian insight in matters of this
kind, and lured him up a bye-path--"the possible profits to accrue to the
Government from the sale of hog-bristles." There is an extensive literature of
hog-bristles, and the shoe, brush, and colorman's trades recognize more
varieties of bristles than you would think possible. After Pinecoffin had
wondered a little at Nafferton's rage for information, he sent back a
monograph, fifty-one pages, on "Products of the Pig." This led him, under
Nafferton's tender handling, straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in
hog-skin for saddles--and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that
pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested--for the past
fourteen months had wearied him--that Nafferton should "raise his pigs before
he tanned them."
Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question.
How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in the West
and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its oriental
congener?" Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what he had written
sixteen month's before, and fancied that he was about to reopen the entire
question. He was too far involved in the hideous tangle to retreat, and, in a
weak moment, he wrote:--"Consult my first letter." Which related to the
Dravidian Pig. As a matter of fact, Pinecoffin had still to reach the
acclimatization stage; having gone off on a side-issue on the merging of types.
THEN Nafferton really unmasked his batteries! He complained to the Government,
in stately language, of "the paucity of help accorded to me in my earnest
attempts to start a potentially remunerative industry, and the flippancy with
which my requests for information are treated by a gentleman whose pseudo-
scholarly attainments should at lest have taught him the primary differences
between the Dravidian and the Berkshire variety of the genus Sus. If I am to
understand that the letter to which he refers me contains his serious views on
the acclimatization of a valuable, though possibly uncleanly, animal, I am
reluctantly compelled to believe," etc., etc.
There was a new man at the head of the Department of Castigation.
The wretched Pinecoffin was told that the Service was made for the Country, and
not the Country for the Service, and that he had better begin to supply
information about Pigs.
Pinecoffin answered insanely that he had written everything that could be
written about Pig, and that some furlough was due to him.
Nafferton got a copy of that letter, and sent it, with the essay on the
Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay
was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in
Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so
sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of
the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical
issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent
them to Pinecoffin.
I have already stated that Pinecoffin came of a soft stock. This last stroke
frightened and shook him. He could not understand it; but he felt he had been,
somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton.
He realized that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without need, and
that he could not well set himself right with his Government. All his
acquaintances asked after his "nebulous discursiveness" or his "blatant self-
sufficiency," and this made him miserable.
He took a train and went to Nafferton, whom he had not seen since the Pig
business began. He also took the cutting from the paper, and blustered feebly
and called Nafferton names, and then died down to a watery, weak protest of the
"I-say-it's-too-bad-you-know" order.
Nafferton was very sympathetic.
"I'm afraid I've given you a good deal of trouble, haven't I?" said he.
"Trouble!" whimpered Pinecoffin; "I don't mind the trouble so much, though that
was bad enough; but what I resent is this showing up in print. It will stick to
me like a burr all through my service. And I DID do my best for your
interminable swine. It's too bad of you, on my soul it is!"
"I don't know," said Nafferton; "have you ever been stuck with a horse? It
isn't the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but what I resent is the
chaff that follows, especially from the boy who stuck me. But I think we'll cry
quite now."
Pinecoffin found nothing to say save bad words; and Nafferton smiled ever so
sweetly, and asked him to dinner.
THE ROUT OF THE WHITE HUSSARS.
It was not in the open fight
We threw away the sword,
But in the lonely watching
In the darkness by the ford.
The waters lapped, the night-wind blew,
Full-armed the Fear was born and grew,
And we were flying ere we knew
From panic in the night.
--Beoni Bar.
Some people hold that an English Cavalry regiment cannot run. This is a
mistake. I have seen four hundred and thirty-seven sabres flying over the face
of the country in abject terror--have seen the best Regiment that ever drew
bridle, wiped off the Army List for the space of two hours. If you repeat this
tale to the White Hussars they will, in all probability, treat you severely.
They are not proud of the incident.
You may know the White Hussars by their "side," which is greater than that of
all the Cavalry Regiments on the roster. If this is not a sufficient mark, you
may know them by their old brandy. It has been sixty years in the Mess and is
worth going far to taste.
Ask for the "McGaire" old brandy, and see that you get it. If the Mess Sergeant
thinks that you are uneducated, and that the genuine article will be lost on
you, he will treat you accordingly. He is a good man. But, when you are at
Mess, you must never talk to your hosts about forced marches or long-distance
rides. The Mess are very sensitive; and, if they think that you are laughing at
them, will tell you so.
As the White Hussars say, it was all the Colonel's fault. He was a new man, and
he ought never to have taken the Command. He said that the Regiment was not
smart enough. This to the White Hussars, who knew they could walk round any
Horse and through any Guns, and over any Foot on the face of the earth! That
insult was the first cause of offence.
Then the Colonel cast the Drum-Horse--the Drum-Horse of the White Hussars!
Perhaps you do not see what an unspeakable crime he had committed. I will try
to make it clear. The soul of the Regiment lives in the Drum-Horse, who carries
the silver kettle-drums. He is nearly always a big piebald Waler. That is a
point of honor; and a Regiment will spend anything you please on a piebald. He
is beyond the ordinary laws of casting. His work is very light, and he only
manoeuvres at a foot-pace. Wherefore, so long as he can step out and look
handsome, his well-being is assured. He knows more about the Regiment than the
Adjutant, and could not make a mistake if he tried.
The Drum-Horse of the White Hussars was only eighteen years old, and perfectly
equal to his duties. He had at least six years' more work in him, and carried
himself with all the pomp and dignity of a Drum-Major of the Guards. The
Regiment had paid Rs. 1,200 for him.
But the Colonel said that he must go, and he was cast in due form and replaced
by a washy, bay beast as ugly as a mule, with a ewe-neck, rat-tail, and cow-
hocks. The Drummer detested that animal, and the best of the Band-horses put
back their ears and showed the whites of their eyes at the very sight of him.
They knew him for an upstart and no gentleman. I fancy that the Colonel's ideas
of smartness extended to the Band, and that he wanted to make it take part in
the regular parade movements. A Cavalry Band is a sacred thing. It only turns
out for Commanding Officers' parades, and the Band Master is one degree more
important than the Colonel. He is a High Priest and the "Keel Row" is his holy
song. The "Keel Row" is the Cavalry Trot; and the man who has never heard that
tune rising, high and shrill, above the rattle of the Regiment going past the
saluting-base, has something yet to hear and understand.
When the Colonel cast the Drum-horse of the White Hussars, there was nearly a
mutiny.
The officers were angry, the Regiment were furious, and the Bandsman swore--
like troopers. The Drum-Horse was going to be put up to auction--public
auction--to be bought, perhaps, by a Parsee and put into a cart! It was worse
than exposing the inner life of the Regiment to the whole world, or selling the
Mess Plate to a Jew--a black Jew.
The Colonel was a mean man and a bully. He knew what the Regiment thought about
his action; and, when the troopers offered to buy the Drum-Horse, he said that
their offer was mutinous and forbidden by the Regulations.
But one of the Subalterns--Hogan-Yale, an Irishman--bought the Drum-Horse for
Rs. 160 at the sale; and the Colonel was wroth. Yale professed repentance--he
was unnaturally submissive--and said that, as he had only made the purchase to
save the horse from possible ill-treatment and starvation, he would now shoot
him and end the business. This appeared to soothe the Colonel, for he wanted
the Drum-Horse disposed of. He felt that he had made a mistake, and could not
of course acknowledge it. Meantime, the presence of the Drum-Horse was an
annoyance to him.
Yale took to himself a glass of the old brandy, three cheroots, and his friend,
Martyn; and they all left the Mess together. Yale and Martyn conferred for two
hours in Yale's quarters; but only the bull-terrier who keeps watch over Yale's
boot-trees knows what they said. A horse, hooded and sheeted to his ears, left
Yale's stables and was taken, very unwillingly, into the Civil Lines. Yale's
groom went with him. Two men broke into the Regimental Theatre and took several
paint-pots and some large scenery brushes. Then night fell over the
Cantonments, and there was a noise as of a horse kicking his loose-box to
pieces in Yale's stables. Yale had a big, old, white Waler trap-horse.
The next day was a Thursday, and the men, hearing that Yale was going to shoot
the Drum-Horse in the evening, determined to give the beast a regular
regimental funeral--a finer one than they would have given the Colonel had he
died just then. They got a bullock-cart and some sacking, and mounds and mounds
of roses, and the body, under sacking, was carried out to the place where the
anthrax cases were cremated; two-thirds of the Regiment followed. There was no
Band, but they all sang "The Place where the old Horse died" as something
respectful and appropriate to the occasion. When the corpse was dumped into the
grave and the men began throwing down armfuls of roses to cover it, the
Farrier-Sergeant ripped out an oath and said aloud:--"Why, it ain't the Drum-
Horse any more than it's me!" The Troop-Sergeant-Majors asked him whether he
had left his head in the Canteen. The Farrier-Sergeant said that he knew the
Drum-Horse's feet as well as he knew his own; but he was silenced when he saw
the regimental number burnt in on the poor stiff, upturned near-fore.
Thus was the Drum-Horse of the White Hussars buried; the Farrier-Sergeant
grumbling. The sacking that covered the corpse was smeared in places with black
paint; and the Farrier-Sergeant drew attention to this fact. But the Troop-
Sergeant-Major of E Troop kicked him severely on the shin, and told him that he
was undoubtedly drunk.
On the Monday following the burial, the Colonel sought revenge on the White
Hussars. Unfortunately, being at that time temporarily in Command of the
Station, he ordered a Brigade field-day. He said that he wished to make the
regiment "sweat for their damned insolence," and he carried out his notion
thoroughly. That Monday was one of the hardest days in the memory of the White
Hussars.
They were thrown against a skeleton-enemy, and pushed forward, and withdrawn,
and dismounted, and "scientifically handled" in every possible fashion over
dusty country, till they sweated profusely.
Their only amusement came late in the day, when they fell upon the battery of
Horse Artillery and chased it for two mile's. This was a personal question, and
most of the troopers had money on the event; the Gunners saying openly that
they had the legs of the White Hussars. They were wrong. A march-past concluded
the campaign, and when the Regiment got back to their Lines, the men were
coated with dirt from spur to chin-strap.
The White Hussars have one great and peculiar privilege. They won it at
Fontenoy, I think.
Many Regiments possess special rights, such as wearing collars with undress
uniform, or a bow of ribbon between the shoulders, or red and white roses in
their helmets on certain days of the year. Some rights are connected with
regimental saints, and some with regimental successes. All are valued highly;
but none so highly as the right of the White Hussars to have the Band playing
when their horses are being watered in the Lines. Only one tune is played, and
that tune never varies. I don't know its real name, but the White Hussars call
it:--"Take me to London again." It sounds very pretty. The Regiment would
sooner be struck off the roster than forego their distinction.
After the "dismiss" was sounded, the officers rode off home to prepare for
stables; and the men filed into the lines, riding easy.
That is to say, they opened their tight buttons, shifted their helmets, and
began to joke or to swear as the humor took them; the more careful slipping off
and easing girths and curbs. A good trooper values his mount exactly as much as
he values himself, and believes, or should believe, that the two together are
irresistible where women or men, girls or guns, are concerned.
Then the Orderly-Officer gave the order:--"Water horses," and the Regiment
loafed off to the squadron-troughs, which were in rear of the stables and
between these and the barracks. There were four huge troughs, one for each
squadron, arranged en echelon, so that the whole Regiment could water in ten
minutes if it liked. But it lingered for seventeen, as a rule, while the Band
played.
The band struck up as the squadrons filed off the troughs and the men slipped
their feet out of the stirrups and chaffed each other.
The sun was just setting in a big, hot bed of red cloud, and the road to the
Civil Lines seemed to run straight into the sun's eye.
There was a little dot on the road. It grew and grew till it showed as a horse,
with a sort of gridiron thing on his back. The red cloud glared through the
bars of the gridiron. Some of the troopers shaded their eyes with their hands
and said:--"What the mischief as that there 'orse got on 'im!"
In another minute they heard a neigh that every soul--horse and man--in the
Regiment knew, and saw, heading straight towards the Band, the dead Drum-Horse
of the White Hussars!
On his withers banged and bumped the kettle-drums draped in crape, and on his
back, very stiff and soldierly, sat a bare-headed skeleton.
The band stopped playing, and, for a moment, there was a hush.
Then some one in E troop--men said it was the Troop-Sergeant-Major--swung his
horse round and yelled. No one can account exactly for what happened
afterwards; but it seems that, at least, one man in each troop set an example
of panic, and the rest followed like sheep. The horses that had barely put
their muzzles into the trough's reared and capered; but, as soon as the Band
broke, which it did when the ghost of the Drum-Horse was about a furlong
distant, all hooves followed suit, and the clatter of the stampede--quite
different from the orderly throb and roar of a movement on parade, or the rough
horse-play of watering in camp--made them only more terrified. They felt that
the men on their backs were afraid of something. When horses once know THAT,
all is over except the butchery.
Troop after troop turned from the troughs and ran--anywhere, and everywhere--
like spilt quicksilver. It was a most extraordinary spectacle, for men and
horses were in all stages of easiness, and the carbine-buckets flopping against
their sides urged the horses on. Men were shouting and cursing, and trying to
pull clear of the Band which was being chased by the Drum-Horse whose rider had
fallen forward and seemed to be spurring for a wager.
The Colonel had gone over to the Mess for a drink. Most of the officers were
with him, and the Subaltern of the Day was preparing to go down to the lines,
and receive the watering reports from the Troop-Sergeant Majors. When "Take me
to London again" stopped, after twenty bars, every one in the Mess said:--"What
on earth has happened?" A minute later, they heard unmilitary noises, and saw,
far across the plain, the White Hussars scattered, and broken, and flying.
The Colonel was speechless with rage, for he thought that the Regiment had
risen against him or was unanimously drunk. The Band, a disorganized mob, tore
past, and at its heels labored the Drum-Horse--the dead and buried Drum-Horse--
with the jolting, clattering skeleton. Hogan-Yale whispered softly to Martyn:--
"No wire will stand that treatment," and the Band, which had doubled like a
hare, came back again. But the rest of the Regiment was gone, was rioting all
over the Province, for the dusk had shut in and each man was howling to his
neighbor that the Drum-Horse was on his flank.
Troop-Horses are far too tenderly treated as a rule. They can, on emergencies,
do a great deal, even with seventeen stone on their backs. As the troopers
found out.
How long this panic lasted I cannot say. I believe that when the moon rose the
men saw they had nothing to fear, and, by twos and threes and half-troops,
crept back into Cantonments very much ashamed of themselves. Meantime, the
Drum-Horse, disgusted at his treatment by old friends, pulled up, wheeled
round, and trotted up to the Mess verandah-steps for bread. No one liked to
run; but no one cared to go forward till the Colonel made a movement and laid
hold of the skeleton's foot. The Band had halted some distance away, and now
came back slowly. The Colonel called it, individually and collectively, every
evil name that occurred to him at the time; for he had set his hand on the
bosom of the Drum-Horse and found flesh and blood. Then he beat the kettle-
drums with his clenched fist, and discovered that they were but made of
silvered paper and bamboo. Next, still swearing, he tried to drag the skeleton
out of the saddle, but found that it had been wired into the cantle. The sight
of the Colonel, with his arms round the skeleton's pelvis and his knee in the
old Drum-Horse's stomach, was striking. Not to say amusing. He worried the
thing off in a minute or two, and threw it down on the ground, saying to the
Band:--"Here, you curs, that's what you're afraid of." The skeleton did not
look pretty in the twilight. The Band-Sergeant seemed to recognize it, for he
began to chuckle and choke. "Shall I take it away, sir?" said the Band-
Sergeant. "Yes," said the Colonel, "take it to Hell, and ride there
yourselves!"
The Band-Sergeant saluted, hoisted the skeleton across his saddle-bow, and led
off to the stables. Then the Colonel began to make inquiries for the rest of
the Regiment, and the language he used was wonderful. He would disband the
Regiment--he would court-martial every soul in it--he would not command such a
set of rabble, and so on, and so on. As the men dropped in, his language grew
wilder, until at last it exceeded the utmost limits of free speech allowed even
to a Colonel of Horse.
Martyn took Hogan-Yale aside and suggested compulsory retirement from the
service as a necessity when all was discovered. Martyn was the weaker man of
the two, Hogan-Yale put up his eyebrows and remarked, firstly, that he was the
son of a Lord, and secondly, that he was as innocent as the babe unborn of the
theatrical resurrection of the Drum-Horse.
"My instructions," said Yale, with a singularly sweet smile, "were that the
Drum-Horse should be sent back as impressively as possible.
I ask you, AM I responsible if a mule-headed friend sends him back in such a
manner as to disturb the peace of mind of a regiment of Her Majesty's Cavalry?"
Martyn said:--"you are a great man and will in time become a General; but I'd
give my chance of a troop to be safe out of this affair."
Providence saved Martyn and Hogan-Yale. The Second-in-Command led the Colonel
away to the little curtained alcove wherein the subalterns of the white Hussars
were accustomed to play poker of nights; and there, after many oaths on the
Colonel's part, they talked together in low tones. I fancy that the Second-in-
Command must have represented the scare as the work of some trooper whom it
would be hopeless to detect; and I know that he dwelt upon the sin and the
shame of making a public laughingstock of the scare.
"They will call us," said the Second-in-Command, who had really a fine
imagination, "they will call us the 'Fly-by-Nights'; they will call us the
'Ghost Hunters'; they will nickname us from one end of the Army list to the
other. All the explanations in the world won't make outsiders understand that
the officers were away when the panic began. For the honor of the Regiment and
for your own sake keep this thing quiet."
The Colonel was so exhausted with anger that soothing him down was not so
difficult as might be imagined. He was made to see, gently and by degrees, that
it was obviously impossible to court-martial the whole Regiment, and equally
impossible to proceed against any subaltern who, in his belief, had any concern
in the hoax.
"But the beast's alive! He's never been shot at all!" shouted the Colonel.
"It's flat, flagrant disobedience! I've known a man broke for less, d----d
sight less. They're mocking me, I tell you, Mutman! They're mocking me!"
Once more, the Second-in-Command set himself to sooth the Colonel, and wrestled
with him for half-an-hour. At the end of that time, the Regimental Sergeant-
Major reported himself. The situation was rather novel tell to him; but he was
not a man to be put out by circumstances. He saluted and said: "Regiment all
come back, Sir." Then, to propitiate the Colonel:--"An' none of the horses any
the worse, Sir."
The Colonel only snorted and answered:--"You'd better tuck the men into their
cots, then, and see that they don't wake up and cry in the night." The Sergeant
withdrew.
His little stroke of humor pleased the Colonel, and, further, he felt slightly
ashamed of the language he had been using. The Second-in-Command worried him
again, and the two sat talking far into the night.
Next day but one, there was a Commanding Officer's parade, and the Colonel
harangued the White Hussars vigorously. The pith of his speech was that, since
the Drum-Horse in his old age had proved himself capable of cutting up the
Whole Regiment, he should return to his post of pride at the head of the band,
BUT the Regiment were a set of ruffians with bad consciences.
The White Hussars shouted, and threw everything movable about them into the
air, and when the parade was over, they cheered the Colonel till they couldn't
speak. No cheers were put up for Lieutenant Hogan-Yale, who smiled very sweetly
in the background.
Said the Second-in-Command to the Colonel, unofficially:--"These little things
ensure popularity, and do not the least affect discipline."
"But I went back on my word," said the Colonel.
"Never mind," said the Second-in-Command. "The White Hussars will follow you
anywhere from today. Regiments are just like women. They will do anything for
trinketry."
A week later, Hogan-Yale received an extraordinary letter from some one who
signed himself "Secretary Charity and Zeal, 3709, E. C.," and asked for "the
return of our skeleton which we have reason to believe is in your possession."
"Who the deuce is this lunatic who trades in bones?" said Hogan-Yale.
"Beg your pardon, Sir," said the Band-Sergeant, "but the skeleton is with me,
an' I'll return it if you'll pay the carriage into the Civil Lines. There's a
coffin with it, Sir."
Hogan-Yale smiled and handed two rupees to the Band-Sergeant, saying:--"Write
the date on the skull, will you?"
If you doubt this story, and know where to go, you can see the date on the
skeleton. But don't mention the matter to the White Hussars.
I happen to know something about it, because I prepared the Drum-Horse for his
resurrection. He did not take kindly to the skeleton at all.
THE BRONCKHORST DIVORCE-CASE.
In the daytime, when she moved about me,
In the night, when she was sleeping at my side,--
I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence.
Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her--
Would to God that she or I had died!
--Confessions.
There was a man called Bronckhorst--a three-cornered, middle-aged man in the
Army--gray as a badger, and, some people said, with a touch of country-blood in
him. That, however, cannot be proved.
Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger than her
husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy eyelids, over weak
eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the lights fell on it.
Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty public
and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is. His manner
towards his wife was coarse. There are many things--including actual assault
with the clenched fist--that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear--as
Mrs. Bronckhorst bore--with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light
of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her
queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows
that she is not what she has been, and--worst of all--the love that she spends
on her children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear
to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm,
in the honeymoon, when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short,
and so go to the other extreme to express their feelings. A similar impulse
makes a man say:--"Hutt, you old beast!" when a favorite horse nuzzles his
coat-front. Unluckily, when the reaction of marriage sets in, the form of
speech remains, and, the tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than
she cares to say. But Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her "Teddy," as she
called him.
Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps--this is only a theory to
account for his infamous behavior later on--he gave way to the queer savage
feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years' married,
when he sees, across the table, the same face of his wedded wife, and knows
that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until day of its
death or his own.
Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three breaths as a
rule, must be a "throw-back" to times when men and women were rather worse than
they are now, and is too unpleasant to be discussed.
Dinner at the Bronckhorst's was an infliction few men cared to undergo.
Bronckhorst took a pleasure in saying things that made his wife wince. When
their little boy came in at dessert, Bronckhorst used to give him half a glass
of wine, and naturally enough, the poor little mite got first riotous, next
miserable, and was removed screaming. Bronckhorst asked if that was the way
Teddy usually behaved, and whether Mrs. Bronckhorst could not spare some of her
time to teach the "little beggar decency." Mrs. Bronckhorst, who loved the boy
more than her own life, tried not to cry--her spirit seemed to have been broken
by her marriage. Lastly, Bronckhorst used to say:--"There! That'll do, that'll
do. For God's sake try to behave like a rational woman. Go into the drawing-
room." Mrs. Bronckhorst would go, trying to carry it all off with a smile; and
the guest of the evening would feel angry and uncomfortable.
After three years of this cheerful life--for Mrs. Bronckhorst had no woman-
friends to talk to--the Station was startled by the news that Bronckhorst had
instituted proceedings ON THE CRIMINAL COUNT, against a man called Biel, who
certainly had been rather attentive to Mrs. Bronckhorst whenever she had
appeared in public. The utter want of reserve with which Bronckhorst treated
his own dishonor helped us to know that the evidence against Biel would be
entirely circumstantial and native. There were no letters; but Bronckhorst said
openly that he would rack Heaven and Earth until he saw Biel superintending the
manufacture of carpets in the Central Jail. Mrs. Bronckhorst kept entirely to
her house, and let charitable folks say what they pleased. Opinions were
divided. Some two-thirds of the Station jumped at once to the conclusion that
Biel was guilty; but a dozen men who knew and liked him held by him. Biel was
furious and surprised. He denied the whole thing, and vowed that he would
thrash Bronckhorst within an inch of his life. No jury, we knew, could convict
a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a
murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees; but
Biel did not care to scrape through by the benefit of a doubt. He wanted the
whole thing cleared: but as he said one night:--"He can prove anything with
servants' evidence, and I've only my bare word." This was about a month before
the case came on; and beyond agreeing with Biel, we could do little. All that
we could be sure of was that the native evidence would be bad enough to blast
Biel's character for the rest of his service; for when a native begins perjury
he perjures himself thoroughly. He does not boggle over details.
Some genius at the end of the table whereat the affair was being talked over,
said:--"Look here! I don't believe lawyers are any good. Get a man to wire to
Strickland, and beg him to come down and pull us through."
Strickland was about a hundred and eighty miles up the line. He had not long
been married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the telegram a chance of return
to the old detective work that his soul lusted after, and next night he came in
and heard our story. He finished his pipe and said oracularly:--"We must get at
the evidence. Oorya bearer, Mussalman khit and methraniayah, I suppose, are the
pillars of the charge. I am on in this piece; but I'm afraid I'm getting rusty
in my talk."
He rose and went into Biel's bedroom where his trunk had been put, and shut the
door. An hour later, we heard him say:--"I hadn't the heart to part with my old
makeups when I married. Will this do?" There was a lothely faquir salaaming in
the doorway.
"Now lend me fifty rupees," said Strickland, "and give me your Words of Honor
that you won't tell my Wife."
He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table drank his
health. What he did only he himself knows. A faquir hung about Bronckhorst's
compound for twelve days. Then a mehter appeared, and when Biel heard of HIM,
he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged. Whether the mehter made love
to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst's ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland
exclusively.
He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly:--"You spoke the
truth, Biel. The whole business is put up from beginning to end. Jove! It
almost astonishes ME! That Bronckhorst-beast isn't fit to live."
There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said:--"How are you going to prove it?
You can't say that you've been trespassing on Bronckhorst's compound in
disguise!"
"No," said Strickland. "Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to get up
something strong about 'inherent improbabilities' and 'discrepancies of
evidence.' He won't have to speak, but it will make him happy. I'M going to run
this business."
Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would happen. They
trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men. When the case came off the Court was
crowded. Strickland hung about in the verandah of the Court, till he met the
Mohammedan khitmatgar. Then he murmured a faquir's blessing in his ear, and
asked him how his second wife did. The man spun round, and, as he looked into
the eyes of "Estreeken Sahib," his jaw dropped. You must remember that before
Strickland was married, he was, as I have told you already, a power among
natives. Strickland whispered a rather coarse vernacular proverb to the effect
that he was abreast of all that was going on, and went into the Court armed
with a gut trainer's-whip.
The Mohammedan was the first witness and Strickland beamed upon him from the
back of the Court. The man moistened his lips with his tongue and, in his
abject fear of "Estreeken Sahib" the faquir, went back on every detail of his
evidence--said he was a poor man and God was his witness that he had forgotten
every thing that Bronckhorst Sahib had told him to say. Between his terror of
Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed, weeping.
Then began the panic among the witnesses. Janki, the ayah, leering chastely
behind her veil, turned gray, and the bearer left the Court. He said that his
Mamma was dying and that it was not wholesome for any man to lie unthriftily in
the presence of "Estreeken Sahib."
Biel said politely to Bronckhorst:--"Your witnesses don't seem to work. Haven't
you any forged letters to produce?" But Bronckhorst was swaying to and fro in
his chair, and there was a dead pause after Biel had been called to order.
Bronckhorst's Counsel saw the look on his client's face, and without more ado,
pitched his papers on the little green baize table, and mumbled something about
having been misinformed. The whole Court applauded wildly, like soldiers at a
theatre, and the Judge began to say what he thought.
. . . . . . . . .
Biel came out of the place, and Strickland dropped a gut trainer's-whip in the
verandah. Ten minutes later, Biel was cutting Bronckhorst into ribbons behind
the old Court cells, quietly and without scandal. What was left of Bronckhorst
was sent home in a carriage; and his wife wept over it and nursed it into a man
again.
Later on, after Biel had managed to hush up the counter-charge against
Bronckhorst of fabricating false evidence, Mrs. Bronckhorst, with her faint
watery smile, said that there had been a mistake, but it wasn't her Teddy's
fault altogether. She would wait till her Teddy came back to her. Perhaps he
had grown tired of her, or she had tried his patience, and perhaps we wouldn't
cut her any more, and perhaps the mothers would let their children play with
"little Teddy" again. He was so lonely. Then the Station invited Mrs.
Bronckhorst everywhere, until Bronckhorst was fit to appear in public, when he
went Home and took his wife with him. According to the latest advices, her
Teddy did "come back to her," and they are moderately happy. Though, of course,
he can never forgive her the thrashing that she was the indirect means of
getting for him.
. . . . . . . . .
What Biel wants to know is:--"Why didn't I press home the charge against the
Bronckhorst-brute, and have him run in?"
What Mrs. Strickland wants to know is:--"How DID my husband bring such a
lovely, lovely Waler from your Station? I know ALL his money-affairs; and I'm
CERTAIN he didn't BUY it."
What I want to know is:--How do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst come to marry men
like Bronckhorst?"
And my conundrum is the most unanswerable of the three.
VENUS ANNODOMINI.
And the years went on as the years must do;
But our great Diana was always new--
Fresh, and blooming, and blonde, and fair,
With azure eyes and with aureate hair;
And all the folk, as they came or went,
Offered her praise to her heart's content.
--Diana of Ephesus.
She had nothing to do with Number Eighteen in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican,
between Visconti's Ceres and the God of the Nile. She was purely an Indian
deity--an Anglo-Indian deity, that is to say--and we called her THE Venus
Annodomini, to distinguish her from other Annodominis of the same everlasting
order. There was a legend among the Hills that she had once been young; but no
living man was prepared to come forward and say boldly that the legend was
true.
Men rode up to Simla, and stayed, and went away and made their name and did
their life's work, and returned again to find the Venus Annodomini exactly as
they had left her. She was as immutable as the Hills. But not quite so green.
All that a girl of eighteen could do in the way of riding, walking, dancing,
picnicking and over-exertion generally, the Venus Annodomini did, and showed no
sign of fatigue or trace of weariness. Besides perpetual youth, she had
discovered, men said, the secret of perpetual health; and her fame spread about
the land. From a mere woman, she grew to be an Institution, insomuch that no
young man could be said to be properly formed, who had not, at some time or
another, worshipped at the shrine of the Venus Annodomini. There was no one
like her, though there were many imitations. Six years in her eyes were no more
than six months to ordinary women; and ten made less visible impression on her
than does a week's fever on an ordinary woman. Every one adored her, and in
return she was pleasant and courteous to nearly every one. Youth had been a
habit of hers for so long, that she could not part with it--never realized, in
fact, the necessity of parting with it--and took for her more chosen associates
young people.
Among the worshippers of the Venus Annodomini was young Gayerson.
"Very Young" Gayerson, he was called to distinguish him from his father "Young"
Gayerson, a Bengal Civilian, who affected the customs--as he had the heart--of
youth. "Very Young" Gayerson was not content to worship placidly and for form's
sake, as the other young men did, or to accept a ride or a dance, or a talk
from the Venus Annodomini in a properly humble and thankful spirit. He was
exacting, and, therefore, the Venus Annodomini repressed him. He worried
himself nearly sick in a futile sort of way over her; and his devotion and
earnestness made him appear either shy or boisterous or rude, as his mood might
vary, by the side of the older men who, with him, bowed before the Venus
Annodomini. She was sorry for him. He reminded her of a lad who, three-and-
twenty years ago, had professed a boundless devotion for her, and for whom in
return she had felt something more than a week's weakness. But that lad had
fallen away and married another woman less than a year after he had worshipped
her; and the Venus Annodomini had almost--not quite--forgotten his name. "Very
Young" Gayerson had the same big blue eyes and the same way of pouting his
underlip when he was excited or troubled. But the Venus Annodomini checked him
sternly none the less. Too much zeal was a thing that she did not approve of;
preferring instead, a tempered and sober tenderness.
"Very Young" Gayerson was miserable, and took no trouble to conceal his
wretchedness. He was in the Army--a Line regiment I think, but am not certain--
and, since his face was a looking-glass and his forehead an open book, by
reason of his innocence, his brothers in arms made his life a burden to him and
embittered his naturally sweet disposition. No one except "Very Young"
Gayerson, and he never told his views, knew how old "Very Young" Gayerson
believed the Venus Annodomini to be. Perhaps he thought her five and twenty, or
perhaps she told him that she was this age. "Very Young" Gayerson would have
forded the Gugger in flood to carry her lightest word, and had implicit faith
in her. Every one liked him, and every one was sorry when they saw him so bound
a slave of the Venus Annodomini. Every one, too, admitted that it was not her
fault; for the Venus Annodomini differed from Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Reiver in
this particular--she never moved a finger to attract any one; but, like Ninon
de l'Enclos, all men were attracted to her. One could admire and respect Mrs.
Hauksbee, despise and avoid Mrs. Reiver, but one was forced to adore the Venus
Annodomini.
"Very Young" Gayerson's papa held a Division or a Collectorate or something
administrative in a particularly unpleasant part of Bengal--full of Babus who
edited newspapers proving that "Young" Gayerson was a "Nero" and a "Scylla" and
a "Charybdis"; and, in addition to the Babus, there was a good deal of
dysentery and cholera abroad for nine months of the year. "Young" Gayerson--he
was about five and forty--rather liked Babus, they amused him, but he objects
to dysentery, and when he could get away, went to Darjiling for the most part.
This particular season he fancied that he would come up to Simla, and see his
boy. The boy was not altogether pleased. He told the Venus Annodomini that his
father was coming up, and she flushed a little and said that she should be
delighted to make his acquaintance. Then she looked long and thoughtfully at
"Very Young" Gayerson; because she was very, very sorry for him, and he was a
very, very big idiot.
"My daughter is coming out in a fortnight, Mr. Gayerson," she said.
"Your WHAT?" said he.
"Daughter," said the Venus Annodomini. "She's been out for a year at Home
already, and I want her to see a little of India. She is nineteen and a very
sensible, nice girl I believe."
"Very Young" Gayerson, who was a short twenty-two years old, nearly fell out of
his chair with astonishment; for he had persisted in believing, against all
belief, in the youth of the Venus Annodomini.
She, with her back to the curtained window, watched the effect of her
sentences and smiled.
"Very Young" Gayerson's papa came up twelve days later, and had not been in
Simla four and twenty hours, before two men, old acquaintances of his, had told
him how "Very Young" Gayerson had been conducting himself.
"Young" Gayerson laughed a good deal, and inquired who the Venus Annodomini
might be. Which proves that he had been living in Bengal where nobody knows
anything except the rate of Exchange. Then he said "boys will be boys," and
spoke to his son about the matter.
"Very Young" Gayerson said that he felt wretched and unhappy; and "Young"
Gayerson said that he repented of having helped to bring a fool into the world.
He suggested that his son had better cut his leave short and go down to his
duties. This led to an unfilial answer, and relations were strained, until
"Young" Gayerson demanded that they should call on the Venus Annodomini. "Very
Young" Gayerson went with his papa, feeling, somehow, uncomfortable and small.
The Venus Annodomini received them graciously and "Young" Gayerson said:--"By
Jove! It's Kitty!" "Very Young" Gayerson would have listened for an
explanation, if his time had not been taken up with trying to talk to a large,
handsome, quiet, well-dressed girl--introduced to him by the Venus Annodomini
as her daughter. She was far older in manners, style and repose than "Very
Young" Gayerson; and, as he realized this thing, he felt sick.
Presently, he heard the Venus Annodomini saying:--"Do you know that your son is
one of my most devoted admirers?"
"I don't wonder," said "Young" Gayerson. Here he raised his voice:--"He follows
his father's footsteps. Didn't I worship the ground you trod on, ever so long
ago, Kitty--and you haven't changed since then. How strange it all seems!"
"Very Young" Gayerson said nothing. His conversation with the daughter of the
Venus Annodomini was, through the rest of the call, fragmentary and disjointed.
. . . . . . . . .
"At five, tomorrow then," said the Venus Annodomini. "And mind you are
punctual."
"At five punctual," said "Young" Gayerson. "You can lend your old father a
horse I dare say, youngster, can't you? I'm going for a ride tomorrow
afternoon."
"Certainly," said "Very Young" Gayerson. "I am going down tomorrow morning. My
ponies are at your service, Sir."
The Venus Annodomini looked at him across the half-light of the room, and her
big gray eyes filled with moisture. She rose and shook hands with him.
"Goodbye, Tom," whispered the Venus Annodomini.
THE BISARA OF POOREE.
Little Blind Fish, thou art marvellous wise,
Little Blind Fish, who put out thy eyes?
Open thine ears while I whisper my wish--
Bring me a lover, thou little Blind Fish.
--The Charm of the Bisara.
Some natives say that it came from the other side of Kulu, where the eleven-
inch Temple Sapphire is. Others that it was made at the Devil-Shrine of Ao-
Chung in Thibet, was stolen by a Kafir, from him by a Gurkha, from him again by
a Lahouli, from him by a khitmatgar, and by this latter sold to an Englishman,
so all its virtue was lost: because, to work properly, the Bisara of Pooree
must be stolen--with bloodshed if possible, but, at any rate, stolen.
These stories of the coming into India are all false. It was made at Pooree
ages since--the manner of its making would fill a small book--was stolen by one
of the Temple dancing-girls there, for her own purposes, and then passed on
from hand to hand, steadily northward, till it reached Hanla: always bearing
the same name--the Bisara of Pooree. In shape it is a tiny, square box of
silver, studded outside with eight small balas-rubies. Inside the box, which
opens with a spring, is a little eyeless fish, carved from some sort of dark,
shiny nut and wrapped in a shred of faded gold-cloth. That is the Bisara of
Pooree, and it were better for a man to take a king cobra in his hand than to
touch the Bisara of Pooree.
All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with except in India where
nothing changes in spite of the shiny, toy-scum stuff that people call
"civilization." Any man who knows about the Bisara of Pooree will tell you what
its powers are--always supposing that it has been honestly stolen. It is the
only regularly working, trustworthy love-charm in the country, with one
exception.
[The other charm is in the hands of a trooper of the Nizam's Horse, at a place
called Tuprani, due north of Hyderabad.] This can be depended upon for a fact.
Some one else may explain it.
If the Bisara be not stolen, but given or bought or found, it turns against its
owner in three years, and leads to ruin or death. This is another fact which
you may explain when you have time.
Meanwhile, you can laugh at it. At present, the Bisara is safe on an ekka-
pony's neck, inside the blue bead-necklace that keeps off the Evil-eye. If the
ekka-driver ever finds it, and wears it, or gives it to his wife, I am sorry
for him.
A very dirty hill-cooly woman, with goitre, owned it at Theog in 1884. It came
into Simla from the north before Churton's khitmatgar bought it, and sold it,
for three times its silver-value, to Churton, who collected curiosities. The
servant knew no more what he had bought than the master; but a man looking over
Churton's collection of curiosities--Churton was an Assistant Commissioner by
the way--saw and held his tongue. He was an Englishman; but knew how to
believe. Which shows that he was different from most Englishmen. He knew that
it was dangerous to have any share in the little box when working or dormant;
for unsought Love is a terrible gift.
Pack--"Grubby" Pack, as we used to call him--was, in every way, a nasty little
man who must have crawled into the Army by mistake. He was three inches taller
than his sword, but not half so strong. And the sword was a fifty-shilling,
tailor-made one. Nobody liked him, and, I suppose, it was his wizenedness and
worthlessness that made him fall so hopelessly in love with Miss Hollis, who
was good and sweet, and five foot seven in her tennis shoes. He was not content
with falling in love quietly, but brought all the strength of his miserable
little nature into the business. If he had not been so objectionable, one might
have pitied him. He vapored, and fretted, and fumed, and trotted up and down,
and tried to make himself pleasing in Miss Hollis's big, quiet, gray eyes, and
failed. It was one of the cases that you sometimes meet, even in this country
where we marry by Code, of a really blind attachment all on one side, without
the faintest possibility of return. Miss Hollis looked on Pack as some sort of
vermin running about the road. He had no prospects beyond Captain's pay, and no
wits to help that out by one anna. In a large-sized man, love like his would
have been touching.
In a good man it would have been grand. He being what he was, it was only a
nuisance.
You will believe this much. What you will not believe, is what follows:
Churton, and The Man who Knew that the Bisara was, were lunching at the Simla
Club together. Churton was complaining of life in general. His best mare had
rolled out of stable down the hill and had broken her back; his decisions were
being reversed by the upper Courts, more than an Assistant Commissioner of
eight years' standing has a right to expect; he knew liver and fever, and, for
weeks past, had felt out of sorts. Altogether, he was disgusted and
disheartened.
Simla Club dining-room is built, as all the world knows, in two sections, with
an arch-arrangement dividing them. Come in, turn to your own left, take the
table under the window, and you cannot see any one who has come in, turning to
the right, and taken a table on the right side of the arch. Curiously enough,
every word that you say can be heard, not only by the other diner, but by the
servants beyond the screen through which they bring dinner. This is worth
knowing: an echoing-room is a trap to be forewarned against.
Half in fun, and half hoping to be believed, The Man who Knew told Churton the
story of the Bisara of Pooree at rather greater length than I have told it to
you in this place; winding up with the suggestion that Churton might as well
throw the little box down the hill and see whether all his troubles would go
with it. In ordinary ears, English ears, the tale was only an interesting bit
of folk-lore. Churton laughed, said that he felt better for his tiffin, and
went out. Pack had been tiffining by himself to the right of the arch, and had
heard everything. He was nearly mad with his absurd infatuation for Miss Hollis
that all Simla had been laughing about.
It is a curious thing that, when a man hates or loves beyond reason, he is
ready to go beyond reason to gratify his feelings. Which he would not do for
money or power merely. Depend upon it, Solomon would never have built altars to
Ashtaroth and all those ladies with queer names, if there had not been trouble
of some kind in his zenana, and nowhere else. But this is beside the story. The
facts of the case are these: Pack called on Churton next day when Churton was
out, left his card, and STOLE the Bisara of Pooree from its place under the
clock on the mantelpiece! Stole it like the thief he was by nature. Three days
later, all Simla was electrified by the news that Miss Hollis had accepted
Pack--the shrivelled rat, Pack! Do you desire clearer evidence than this? The
Bisara of Pooree had been stolen, and it worked as it had always done when won
by foul means.
There are three or four times in a man's life when he is justified in meddling
with other people's affairs to play Providence.
The Man who Knew felt that he WAS justified; but believing and acting on a
belief are quite different things. The insolent satisfaction of Pack as he
ambled by the side of Miss Hollis, and Churton's striking release from liver,
as soon as the Bisara of Pooree had gone, decided the Man. He explained to
Churton and Churton laughed, because he was not brought up to believe that men
on the Government House List steal--at least little things. But the miraculous
acceptance by Miss Hollis of that tailor, Pack, decided him to take steps on
suspicion. He vowed that he only wanted to find out where his ruby-studded
silver box had vanished to. You cannot accuse a man on the Government House
List of stealing. And if you rifle his room you are a thief yourself. Churton,
prompted by The Man who Knew, decided on burglary. If he found nothing in
Pack's room . . . . but it is not nice to think of what would have happened in
that case.
Pack went to a dance at Benmore--Benmore WAS Benmore in those days, and not an
office--and danced fifteen waltzes out of twenty-two with Miss Hollis. Churton
and The Man took all the keys that they could lay hands on, and went to Pack's
room in the hotel, certain that his servants would be away. Pack was a cheap
soul. He had not purchased a decent cash-box to keep his papers in, but one of
those native imitations that you buy for ten rupees. It opened to any sort of
key, and there at the bottom, under Pack's Insurance Policy, lay the Bisara of
Pooree!
Churton called Pack names, put the Bisara of Pooree in his pocket, and went to
the dance with The Man. At least, he came in time for supper, and saw the
beginning of the end in Miss Hollis's eyes. She was hysterical after supper,
and was taken away by her Mamma.
At the dance, with the abominable Bisara in his pocket, Churton twisted his
foot on one of the steps leading down to the old Rink, and had to be sent home
in a rickshaw, grumbling. He did not believe in the Bisara of Pooree any the
more for this manifestation, but he sought out Pack and called him some ugly
names; and "thief" was the mildest of them. Pack took the names with the
nervous smile of a little man who wants both soul and body to resent an insult,
and went his way. There was no public scandal.
A week later, Pack got his definite dismissal from Miss Hollis.
There had been a mistake in the placing of her affections, she said.
So he went away to Madras, where he can do no great harm even if he lives to be
a Colonel.
Churton insisted upon The Man who Knew taking the Bisara of Pooree as a gift.
The Man took it, went down to the Cart Road at once, found an ekka pony with a
blue head-necklace, fastened the Bisara of Pooree inside the necklace with a
piece of shoe-string and thanked Heaven that he was rid of a danger. Remember,
in case you ever find it, that you must not destroy the Bisara of Pooree. I
have not time to explain why just now, but the power lies in the little wooden
fish. Mister Gubernatis or Max Muller could tell you more about it than I.
You will say that all this story is made up. Very well. If ever you come across
a little silver, ruby-studded box, seven-eighths of an inch long by three-
quarters wide, with a dark-brown wooden fish, wrapped in gold cloth, inside it,
keep it. Keep it for three years, and then you will discover for yourself
whether my story is true or false.
Better still, steal it as Pack did, and you will be sorry that you had not
killed yourself in the beginning.
THE GATE OF A HUNDRED SORROWS.
"If I can attain Heaven for a pice, why should you be envious?"
--Opium Smoker's Proverb.
This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste, spoke it
all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down
from his mouth as he answered my questions so:--
It lies between the Copper-smith's Gully and the pipe-stem sellers' quarter,
within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan. I
don't mind telling any one this much, but I defy him to find the Gate, however
well he may think he knows the City. You might even go through the very gully
it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser. We used to call the gully,
"the Gully of the Black Smoke," but its native name is altogether different of
course. A loaded donkey couldn't pass between the walls; and, at one point,
just before you reach the Gate, a bulged house-front makes people go along all
sideways.
It isn't really a gate though. It's a house. Old Fung-Tching had it first five
years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife
there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the
Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up north and opened the Gate as a house
where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka,
respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-
khanas, that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business
thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little
chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone.
All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen.
Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and
night, night and day, was a caution. I've been at it five years, and I can do
my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that
way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money, very keen; and that's
what I can't understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his
nephew has got all that now; and the old man's gone back to China to be buried.
He kept the big upper room, where his best customers gathered, as neat as a new
pin. In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching's Joss--almost as ugly as Fung-
Tching--and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never
smelt 'em when the pipes were going thick. Opposite the Joss was Fung-Tching's
coffin. He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man
came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with
red and gold writings on it, and I've heard that Fung-Tching brought it out all
the way from China. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know that,
if I came first in the evening, I used to spread my mat just at the foot of it.
It was a quiet corner you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at
the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the
room--only the coffin, and the old Joss all green and blue and purple with age
and polish.
Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place "The Gate of a Hundred
Sorrows." (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-sounding fancy names.
Most of them are flowery. As you'll see in Calcutta.) We used to find that out
for ourselves. Nothing grows on you so much, if you're white, as the Black
Smoke. A yellow man is made different. Opium doesn't tell on him scarcely at
all; but white and black suffer a good deal. Of course, there are some people
that the Smoke doesn't touch any more than tobacco would at first. They just
doze a bit, as one would fall asleep naturally, and next morning they are
almost fit for work. Now, I was one of that sort when I began, but I've been at
it for five years pretty steadily, and its different now. There was an old aunt
of mine, down Agra way, and she left me a little at her death. About sixty
rupees a month secured. Sixty isn't much. I can recollect a time, seems
hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that I was getting my three hundred a
month, and pickings, when I was working on a big timber contract in Calcutta.
I didn't stick to that work for long. The Black Smoke does not allow of much
other business; and even though I am very little affected by it, as men go, I
couldn't do a day's work now to save my life. After all, sixty rupees is what I
want. When old Fung-Tching was alive he used to draw the money for me, give me
about half of it to live on (I eat very little), and the rest he kept himself.
I was free of the Gate at any time of the day and night, and could smoke and
sleep there when I liked, so I didn't care. I know the old man made a good
thing out of it; but that's no matter. Nothing matters, much to me; and,
besides, the money always came fresh and fresh each month.
There was ten of us met at the Gate when the place was first opened. Me, and
two Baboos from a Government Office somewhere in Anarkulli, but they got the
sack and couldn't pay (no man who has to work in the daylight can do the Black
Smoke for any length of time straight on); a Chinaman that was Fung-Tching's
nephew; a bazar-woman that had got a lot of money somehow; an English loafer--
Mac-Somebody I think, but I have forgotten--that smoked heaps, but never seemed
to pay anything (they said he had saved Fung-Tching's life at some trial in
Calcutta when he was a barrister): another Eurasian, like myself, from Madras;
a half-caste woman, and a couple of men who said they had come from the North.
I think they must have been Persians or Afghans or something. There are not
more than five of us living now, but we come regular. I don't know what
happened to the Baboos; but the bazar-woman she died after six months of the
Gate, and I think Fung-Tching took her bangles and nose-ring for himself. But
I'm not certain. The Englishman, he drank as well as smoked, and he dropped
off. One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the
mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it
was full of foul air.
They found him dead at the bottom of it. So, you see, there is only me, the
Chinaman, the half-caste woman that we call the Memsahib (she used to live with
Fung-Tching), the other Eurasian, and one of the Persians. The Memsahib looks
very old now. I think she was a young woman when the Gate was opened; but we
are all old for the matter of that. Hundreds and hundreds of years old. It is
very hard to keep count of time in the Gate, and besides, time doesn't matter
to me. I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month.
A very, very long while ago, when I used to be getting three hundred and fifty
rupees a month, and pickings, on a big timber-contract at Calcutta, I had a
wife of sorts. But she's dead now. People said that I killed her by taking to
the Black Smoke. Perhaps I did, but it's so long since it doesn't matter.
Sometimes when I first came to the Gate, I used to feel sorry for it; but
that's all over and done with long ago, and I draw my sixty rupees fresh and
fresh every month, and am quite happy. Not DRUNK happy, you know, but always
quiet and soothed and contented.
How did I take to it? It began at Calcutta. I used to try it in my own house,
just to see what it was like. I never went very far, but I think my wife must
have died then. Anyhow, I found myself here, and got to know Fung-Tching. I
don't remember rightly how that came about; but he told me of the Gate and I
used to go there, and, somehow, I have never got away from it since. Mind you,
though, the Gate was a respectable place in Fung-Tching's time where you could
be comfortable, and not at all like the chandoo-khanas where the niggers go.
No; it was clean and quiet, and not crowded. Of course, there were others
beside us ten and the man; but we always had a mat apiece with a wadded woollen
head-piece, all covered with black and red dragons and things; just like a
coffin in the corner.
At the end of one's third pipe the dragons used to move about and fight. I've
watched 'em, many and many a night through. I used to regulate my Smoke that
way, and now it takes a dozen pipes to make 'em stir. Besides, they are all
torn and dirty, like the mats, and old Fung-Tching is dead. He died a couple of
years ago, and gave me the pipe I always use now--a silver one, with queer
beasts crawling up and down the receiver-bottle below the cup. Before that, I
think, I used a big bamboo stem with a copper cup, a very small one, and a
green jade mouthpiece. It was a little thicker than a walking-stick stem, and
smoked sweet, very sweet. The bamboo seemed to suck up the smoke. Silver
doesn't, and I've got to clean it out now and then, that's a great deal of
trouble, but I smoke it for the old man's sake. He must have made a good thing
out of me, but he always gave me clean mats and pillows, and the best stuff you
could get anywhere.
When he died, his nephew Tsin-ling took up the Gate, and he called it the
"Temple of the Three Possessions;" but we old ones speak of it as the "Hundred
Sorrows," all the same. The nephew does things very shabbily, and I think the
Memsahib must help him. She lives with him; same as she used to do with the old
man. The two let in all sorts of low people, niggers and all, and the Black
Smoke isn't as good as it used to be. I've found burnt bran in my pipe over and
over again. The old man would have died if that had happened in his time.
Besides, the room is never cleaned, and all the mats are torn and cut at the
edges. The coffin has gone--gone to China again--with the old man and two
ounces of smoke inside it, in case he should want 'em on the way.
The Joss doesn't get so many sticks burnt under his nose as he used to; that's
a sign of ill-luck, as sure as Death. He's all brown, too, and no one ever
attends to him. That's the Memsahib's work, I know; because, when Tsin-ling
tried to burn gilt paper before him, she said it was a waste of money, and, if
he kept a stick burning very slowly, the Joss wouldn't know the difference. So
now we've got the sticks mixed with a lot of glue, and they take half-an-hour
longer to burn, and smell stinky. Let alone the smell of the room by itself. No
business can get on if they try that sort of thing.
The Joss doesn't like it. I can see that. Late at night, sometimes, he turns
all sorts of queer colors--blue and green and red--just as he used to do when
old Fung-Tching was alive; and he rolls his eyes and stamps his feet like a
devil.
I don't know why I don't leave the place and smoke quietly in a little room of
my own in the bazar. Most like, Tsin-ling would kill me if I went away--he
draws my sixty rupees now--and besides, it's so much trouble, and I've grown to
be very fond of the Gate. It's not much to look at. Not what it was in the old
man's time, but I couldn't leave it. I've seen so many come in and out. And
I've seen so many die here on the mats that I should be afraid of dying in the
open now. I've seen some things that people would call strange enough; but
nothing is strange when you're on the Black Smoke, except the Black Smoke. And
if it was, it wouldn't matter.
Fung-Tching used to be very particular about his people, and never got in any
one who'd give trouble by dying messy and such. But the nephew isn't half so
careful. He tells everywhere that he keeps a "first-chop" house. Never tries to
get men in quietly, and make them comfortable like Fung-Tching did. That's why
the Gate is getting a little bit more known than it used to be. Among the
niggers of course. The nephew daren't get a white, or, for matter of that, a
mixed skin into the place. He has to keep us three of course--me and the
Memsahib and the other Eurasian. We're fixtures.
But he wouldn't give us credit for a pipeful--not for anything.
One of these days, I hope, I shall die in the Gate. The Persian and the Madras
man are terrible shaky now. They've got a boy to light their pipes for them. I
always do that myself. Most like, I shall see them carried out before me. I
don't think I shall ever outlive the Memsahib or Tsin-ling. Women last longer
than men at the Black-Smoke, and Tsin-ling has a deal of the old man's blood in
him, though he DOES smoke cheap stuff. The bazar-woman knew when she was going
two days before her time; and SHE died on a clean mat with a nicely wadded
pillow, and the old man hung up her pipe just above the Joss. He was always
fond of her, I fancy. But he took her bangles just the same.
I should like to die like the bazar-woman--on a clean, cool mat with a pipe of
good stuff between my lips. When I feel I'm going, I shall ask Tsin-ling for
them, and he can draw my sixty rupees a month, fresh and fresh, as long as he
pleases, and watch the black and red dragons have their last big fight
together; and then . . . .
Well, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters much to me--only I wished Tsin-ling
wouldn't put bran into the Black Smoke.
THE STORY OF MUHAMMAD DIN.
"Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home little children
crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying."
--Munichandra, translated by Professor Peterson.
The polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the
mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khitmatgar, was cleaning for
me.
"Does the Heaven-born want this ball?" said Imam Din, deferentially.
The Heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo-ball
to a khitmatgar?
"By Your Honor's favor, I have a little son. He has seen this ball, and desires
it to play with. I do not want it for myself."
No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with
polo-balls. He carried out the battered thing into the verandah; and there
followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-
thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had
been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to
see that polo-ball?
Next day, coming back from office half an hour earlier than usual, I was aware
of a small figure in the dining-room--a tiny, plump figure in a ridiculously
inadequate shirt which came, perhaps, half-way down the tubby stomach. It
wandered round the room, thumb in mouth, crooning to itself as it took stock of
the pictures. Undoubtedly this was the "little son."
He had no business in my room, of course; but was so deeply absorbed in his
discoveries that he never noticed me in the doorway. I stepped into the room
and startled him nearly into a fit. He sat down on the ground with a gasp. His
eyes opened, and his mouth followed suit. I knew what was coming, and fled,
followed by a long, dry howl which reached the servants' quarters far more
quickly than any command of mine had ever done. In ten seconds Imam Din was in
the dining-room. Then despairing sobs arose, and I returned to find Imam Din
admonishing the small sinner who was using most of his shirt as a handkerchief.
"This boy," said Imam Din, judicially, "is a budmash, a big budmash. He will,
without doubt, go to the jail-khana for his behavior." Renewed yells from the
penitent, and an elaborate apology to myself from Imam Din.
"Tell the baby," said I, "that the Sahib is not angry, and take him away." Imam
Din conveyed my forgiveness to the offender, who had now gathered all his shirt
round his neck, string-wise, and the yell subsided into a sob. The two set off
for the door. "His name," said Imam Din, as though the name were part of the
crime, "is Muhammad Din, and he is a budmash." Freed from present danger,
Muhammad Din turned round, in his father's arms, and said gravely:--"It is true
that my name is Muhammad Din, Tahib, but I am not a budmash. I am a MAN!"
From that day dated my acquaintance with Muhammad Din. Never again did he come
into my dining-room, but on the neutral ground of the compound, we greeted each
other with much state, though our conversation was confined to "Talaam, Tahib"
from his side and "Salaam Muhammad Din" from mine. Daily on my return from
office, the little white shirt, and the fat little body used to rise from the
shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid; and daily I
checked my horse here, that my salutation might not be slurred over or given
unseemly.
Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the compound, in
and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands of his own. One day I
stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down the ground. He had half buried the
polo-ball in dust, and stuck six shrivelled old marigold flowers in a circle
round it. Outside that circle again, was a rude square, traced out in bits of
red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a
little bank of dust. The bhistie from the well-curb put in a plea for the small
architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much
disfigure my garden.
Heaven knows that I had no intention of touching the child's work then or
later; but, that evening, a stroll through the garden brought me unawares full
on it; so that I trampled, before I knew, marigold-heads, dust-bank, and
fragments of broken soap-dish into confusion past all hope of mending. Next
morning I came upon Muhammad Din crying softly to himself over the ruin I had
wrought.
Some one had cruelly told him that the Sahib was very angry with him for
spoiling the garden, and had scattered his rubbish using bad language the
while. Muhammad Din labored for an hour at effacing every trace of the dust-
bank and pottery fragments, and it was with a tearful apologetic face that he
said, "Talaam Tahib," when I came home from the office. A hasty inquiry
resulted in Imam Din informing Muhammad Din that by my singular favor he was
permitted to disport himself as he pleased. Whereat the child took heart and
fell to tracing the ground-plan of an edifice which was to eclipse the
marigold-polo-ball creation.
For some months, the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit
among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent
palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn
pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls--
always alone and always crooning to himself.
A gayly-spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little
buildings; and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than
ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated
for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubilant song. Then
he began tracing in dust. It would certainly be a wondrous palace, this one,
for it was two yards long and a yard broad in ground-plan. But the palace was
never completed.
Next day there was no Muhammad Din at the head of the carriage- drive, and no
"Talaam Tahib" to welcome my return. I had grown accustomed to the greeting,
and its omission troubled me. Next day, Imam Din told me that the child was
suffering slightly from fever and needed quinine. He got the medicine, and an
English Doctor.
"They have no stamina, these brats," said the Doctor, as he left Imam Din's
quarters.
A week later, though I would have given much to have avoided it, I met on the
road to the Mussulman burying-ground Imam Din, accompanied by one other friend,
carrying in his arms, wrapped in a white cloth, all that was left of little
Muhammad Din.
ON THE STRENGTH OF A LIKENESS.
If your mirror be broken, look into still water; but have a care that you do
not fall in.
--Hindu Proverb.
Next to a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young
man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited
attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like, and blase, and
cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers from want of
exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very happy in a tender,
twilight fashion.
Hannasyde's affair of the heart had been a Godsend to him. It was four years
old, and the girl had long since given up thinking of it.
She had married and had many cares of her own. In the beginning, she had told
Hannasyde that, "while she could never be anything more than a sister to him,
she would always take the deepest interest in his welfare." This startlingly
new and original remark gave Hannasyde something to think over for two years;
and his own vanity filled in the other twenty-four months. Hannasyde was quite
different from Phil Garron, but, none the less, had several points in common
with that far too lucky man.
He kept his unrequited attachment by him as men keep a well-smoked pipe--for
comfort's sake, and because it had grown dear in the using. It brought him
happily through the Simla season. Hannasyde was not lovely. There was a crudity
in his manners, and a roughness in the way in which he helped a lady on to her
horse, that did not attract the other sex to him. Even if he had cast about for
their favor, which he did not. He kept his wounded heart all to himself for a
while.
Then trouble came to him. All who go to Simla, know the slope from the
Telegraph to the Public Works Office. Hannasyde was loafing up the hill, one
September morning between calling hours, when a 'rickshaw came down in a hurry,
and in the 'rickshaw sat the living, breathing image of the girl who had made
him so happily unhappy.
Hannasyde leaned against the railing and gasped. He wanted to run downhill
after the 'rickshaw, but that was impossible; so he went forward with most of
his blood in his temples. It was impossible, for many reasons, that the woman
in the 'rickshaw could be the girl he had known. She was, he discovered later,
the wife of a man from Dindigul, or Coimbatore, or some out-of-the-way place,
and she had come up to Simla early in the season for the good of her health.
She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the end of the season;
and in all likelihood would never return to Simla again, her proper Hill-
station being Ootacamund. That night, Hannasyde, raw and savage from the raking
up of all old feelings, took counsel with himself for one measured hour. What
he decided upon was this; and you must decide for yourself how much genuine
affection for the old love, and how much a very natural inclination to go
abroad and enjoy himself, affected the decision. Mrs. Landys-Haggert would
never in all human likelihood cross his path again. So whatever he did didn't
much matter. She was marvellously like the girl who "took a deep interest" and
the rest of the formula. All things considered, it would be pleasant to make
the acquaintance of Mrs. Landys-Haggert, and for a little time--only a very
little time--to make believe that he was with Alice Chisane again. Every one is
more or less mad on one point. Hannasyde's particular monomania was his old
love, Alice Chisane.
He made it his business to get introduced to Mrs. Haggert, and the introduction
prospered. He also made it his business to see as much as he could of that
lady. When a man is in earnest as to interviews, the facilities which Simla
offers are startling. There are garden-parties, and tennis-parties, and
picnics, and luncheons at Annandale, and rifle-matches, and dinners and balls;
besides rides and walks, which are matters of private arrangement.
Hannasyde had started with the intention of seeing a likeness, and he ended by
doing much more. He wanted to be deceived, he meant to be deceived, and he
deceived himself very thoroughly. Not only were the face and figure, the face
and figure of Alice Chisane, but the voice and lower tones were exactly the
same, and so were the turns of speech; and the little mannerisms, that every
woman has, of gait and gesticulation, were absolutely and identically the same.
The turn of the head was the same; the tired look in the eyes at the end of a
long walk was the same; the sloop and wrench over the saddle to hold in a
pulling horse was the same; and once, most marvellous of all, Mrs. Landys-
Haggert singing to herself in the next room, while Hannasyde was waiting to
take her for a ride, hummed, note for note, with a throaty quiver of the voice
in the second line:--"Poor Wandering One!" exactly as Alice Chisane had hummed
it for Hannasyde in the dusk of an English drawing-room. In the actual woman
herself--in the soul of her--there was not the least likeness; she and Alice
Chisane being cast in different moulds. But all that Hannasyde wanted to know
and see and think about, was this maddening and perplexing likeness of face and
voice and manner. He was bent on making a fool of himself that way; and he was
in no sort disappointed.
Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any sort
of woman; but Mrs. Landys-Haggert, being a woman of the world, could make
nothing of Hannasyde's admiration.
He would take any amount of trouble--he was a selfish man habitually--to meet
and forestall, if possible, her wishes.
Anything she told him to do was law; and he was, there could be no doubting it,
fond of her company so long as she talked to him, and kept on talking about
trivialities. But when she launched into expression of her personal views and
her wrongs, those small social differences that make the spice of Simla life,
Hannasyde was neither pleased nor interested. He didn't want to know anything
about Mrs. Landys-Haggert, or her experiences in the past--she had travelled
nearly all over the world, and could talk cleverly--he wanted the likeness of
Alice Chisane before his eyes and her voice in his ears.
Anything outside that, reminding him of another personality jarred, and he
showed that it did.
Under the new Post Office, one evening, Mrs. Landys-Haggert turned on him, and
spoke her mind shortly and without warning. "Mr. Hannasyde," said she, "will
you be good enough to explain why you have appointed yourself my special
cavalier servente? I don't understand it. But I am perfectly certain, somehow
or other, that you don't care the least little bit in the world for ME." This
seems to support, by the way, the theory that no man can act or tell lies to a
woman without being found out. Hannasyde was taken off his guard. His defence
never was a strong one, because he was always thinking of himself, and he
blurted out, before he knew what he was saying, this inexpedient answer:--"No
more I do."
The queerness of the situation and the reply, made Mrs. Haggert laugh. Then it
all came out; and at the end of Hannasyde's lucid explanation, Mrs. Haggert
said, with the least little touch of scorn in her voice:--"So I'm to act as the
lay-figure for you to hang the rags of your tattered affections on, am I?"
Hannasyde didn't see what answer was required, and he devoted himself generally
and vaguely to the praise of Alice Chisane, which was unsatisfactory. Now it is
to be thoroughly made clear that Mrs. Haggert had not the shadow of a ghost of
an interest in Hannasyde.
Only--only no woman likes being made love through instead of to--specially on
behalf of a musty divinity of four years' standing.
Hannasyde did not see that he had made any very particular exhibition of
himself. He was glad to find a sympathetic soul in the arid wastes of Simla.
When the season ended, Hannasyde went down to his own place and Mrs. Haggert to
hers. "It was like making love to a ghost," said Hannasyde to himself, "and it
doesn't matter; and now I'll get to my work." But he found himself thinking
steadily of the Haggert-Chisane ghost; and he could not be certain whether it
was Haggert or Chisane that made up the greater part of the pretty phantom.
. . . . . . . . .
He got understanding a month later.
A peculiar point of this peculiar country is the way in which a heartless
Government transfers men from one end of the Empire to the other. You can never
be sure of getting rid of a friend or an enemy till he or she dies. There was a
case once--but that's another story.
Haggert's Department ordered him up from Dindigul to the Frontier at two days'
notice, and he went through, losing money at every step, from Dindigul to his
station. He dropped Mrs. Hagg